It could have been a lovely beginning to a lovely day. But it wasn't. Of course she was aware of her own shortcoming-that never-ending jealousy of her sister.
Here, at breakfast, she was being told that her sister's marriage was somehow on the rocks and that "dear Sis" was coming home. Her defenses were immediately up, and even she thought how foolish that was. But she simply could not help it. It has always been like this, and she admitted to herself that it surely must be her own fault. But why did she feel so ill-at-ease when "dear Sis" was upon the scene?
She didn't know.
The letter had arrived and now her mother was waving it about the kitchen, proclaiming it must be Janet's husband who was at fault. She sipped her coffee and asked, "What's the matter with Bob?" She knew that the words sounded curt, that she was rushing to Bob's defense without knowing any of the details. But there was this sudden fear in her and she had not had time to learn to cope with it. She knew that her fear was part and parcel of her jealousy of Janet. Therefore her sympathies were with Bob. Anyway, Bob was all right-an ambitious, steady-going, hardworking young engineer who had shown quite plainly that he adored the ground Janet walked on. It would take a lot of convincing to make Anne believe that Bob was the one who had failed in the marriage.
She said, spooning sugar into a second cup of coffee: "You never believed that anyone was good enough for Janet, Mother." And she couldn't keep the bitterness out of her next words. "You didn't even think that Kenny was good enough for her. But when Kenny fell in love with me, you seemed to think that I was a lucky girl."
Her mother patted the carefully set waves of snowy white hair which gave the lie to her youthful and still-pretty face. Her wide, surprisingly alert blue eyes flashed annoyance. "I'm surprised at you, Anne. If your sister is unhappy, she's doing exactly the right thing to come right straight home where she belongs. And as for Bob, I don't recall ever having said that he wasn't good enough for Janet. If he had succeeded in making her happy, I'd be the last one to say a word against him. But she is miserably unhappy, and I think it's partly because Bob is a little too crude to understand Janet's sensitive make-up."
Anne had to smile to herself. Janet's "sensitive make-up" was something she'd been having impressed on her ever since she'd been old enough to understand what the words meant. Janet was spoiled and pampered and selfish, because her mother had made her that way. That's what Janet's "sensitive make-up" amounted to. If that was being catty, then Anne was catty and had no apologies to make for it. It wasn't that she really disliked her sister-four years older than herself-who had always been considered the beauty of the family. But she felt that to like a person, you needn't harbor a lot of foolish illusions about them.
Anne had no illusions whatever about Janet. However, her mother, who doted on Janet, had nothing else but. That was about what it got down to.
"What I did say at the time," Nellie was explaining, "was that I believed Janet could have done better for herself if she had been willing to wait. I just never saw a girl who had so many chances to marry. Almost every man who came along seemed to fall in love with her, and I begged and pleaded with her not to be in such a hurry. I remember saying to her-we were sitting here right at this same kitchen table where you and I are sitting now-'Janet, if you go rushing into this marriage without taking more time to think it over, you mark my words, the day will come when you'll regret it.' " Anne didn't need to be reminded. How well she remembered the arguments, tearful and pleading, on her mother's part. Janet was mostly defiant and didn't want to hear a word of it. "I love Bob and I'm going to marry him before he goes off to war, and nobody can stop me," was what she kept repeating. It had gone on for a solid week. Anne remembered that Saturday night when Janet came home from a dance, her dark eyes starry, her mouth tremulous with emotional excitement, to announce that she and Bob Thompson were engaged. And then the following Saturday they were married, very quietly, in the front parlor of the rambling old house where three generations of Veigh women had been born and grown up and fallen in love and married.
In this small, typically southern town, where a girl just had to be born with some claim to beauty and charm if she wanted to get ahead, the beauty of the "Veigh women" was traditional. Old-timers, in describing them to newcomers, would say: "The Veigh women are always beauties." And then they would say, or had said until Janet got married and left town, "Now you take Janet Veigh. Did you ever see such a raving beauty?"
The wedding, although quiet, with only the family and closest friends in attendance, had been lovely. The gleam of lighted candles threw a sheen over the white satin altar in the old-fashioned bay window. The pungent fragrance of early spring roses filled the air. Bob looked so handsome in his uniform with the brand new silver bars on his shoulders, and so tall and proud as he waited there near the altar for Janet to join him. Janet, in white satin, her bouquet of long-stemmed roses cradled in her arms, looked beautiful, far more exotic and excitingly lovely than any mere angel ever looked.
She wore no veil, and the glossy waves of her chestnut hair shone with a coppery gleam.
As she had come slowly into the room on Uncle Ned's arm, her eyes, large and always darkly luminous, had seemed to blaze with happiness and suppressed excitement. Here was no shy, reluctant, timid bride. Here was a gorgeous girl, thrilling to all the wonder of youth and love and the awareness of her own beauty, impatient to catch up with the happiness that was waiting for her and to drink deeply and richly of it.
Anne, sixteen at the time, had been her sister's only attendant. She had worn pale blue net over deeper blue taffeta, and as one or two people said afterwards, "Anne looked real sweet, too." But Anne, of course, couldn't hold a candle to Janet for looks. And never would.
Sometimes, when she thought about it, Anne would feel a little ashamed that the only emotion she had felt that day was a sense of great relief. She had stood there by the altar holding Janet's bouquet while her sister knelt by Bob's side. She had known, without needing to look, that her mother was crying softly. And she had known that Kenny Wilcox, Janet's recently discarded fiance, was standing at the back of the room, his face set and grim. If there were no tears in his eyes, they were there in his heart.
There had been others with wet eyes- Aunt Molly Graham for one-and with a sense of loneliness in their hearts, because while they rejoiced in Janet's happiness, they wept over their own loss of her. She was going away with her man, to make her own home, to build her own life as a wife and, in time, a mother. She would be back on visits, but she would never really belong to them again, and for this they sorrowed.
All except Anne! With Janet gone, now maybe I'll have a chance, she had thought. It wasn't exactly a thing to be proud of, to look back and remember that as your chief reaction to your sister's marriage.
Glad to get rid of her sister, to get her out of the house, out of the town? Well, that was hardly a fair way to put it. At least Anne didn't think so. But was there anything shameful about being sick and tired of being so overshadowed by Janet's beauty and popularity? How she hated her sister's very clever way of drawing all attention to herself and keeping it there so that people scarcely seemed to notice that Anne was even alive!
She came back out of her brief reverie to hear her mother saying the words which, in Anne's opinion, were certainly uncalled-for. If she hadn't known her mother so well, Anne could have taken them for intentional cruelty. But she knew better. There was no cruelty or even unkindness in Nellie's gentle nature. It was simply that where her favorite daughter was concerned, she seemed to have a completely blind spot as to the feelings of others. So now she said: "I can't help but wish sometimes that Janet had never broken off with Kenny. She was crazy enough about him at one time, and now that he's doing so well as a doctor, I half-blame myself for discouraging that match. But Kenny hadn't finished college at the time, and as a youngster he was such a quiet boy, I just didn't know if he'd ever amount to much. If I had realized-" Anne had a wild desire to scream or to smash something. By a supreme effort of will she kept her voice perfectly controlled. "You seem to forget, Mother, that Kenny and I are engaged. Do you think it's kind to talk as if Kenny were only marrying me because he couldn't get Janet?"
"I'm sorry, dear," her mother said quickly. "I shouldn't have said that. I just didn't think. Five years is a long time, and of course you are the one Kenny wants now. But I just couldn't help remembering how broken up he seemed at Janet's wedding."
There was a wide streak of cruelty in Janet's nature, or was it being unfair to think of it that way? Perhaps it had been only the selfish vanity of a still-adolescent girl which had made Janet insist upon inviting Kenny to her wedding, after having jilted him only a few short weeks before.
Even her mother, at the time, had questioned the good taste of that invitation. "After all, dear, we're having very few outside the family. And Kenny must feel terribly broken up about your throwing him over. It scarcely seems necessary to fling your marriage to another man in his face."
But Janet had insisted. "I want Kenny at my wedding, Mother. After all, he's one of my oldest friends and we've been so close."
"Yes. Janet and I were very close. I loved her very dearly. It's hard for me to remember back to when I wasn't in love with Janet. If s pretty hard for me to get used to the idea that she's married another man and gone away with him."
That had been Kenny talking. Several hours after Janet was married. After the festivities were over, and Janet and Bob had left for their week-end honeymoon in a secluded spot in the Virginia Blue Ridge mountains, Anne and Kenny had slipped out of the house to take a walk together.
They had always been good friends, although Kenny, at twenty-two, looked upon Anne, six years younger, as still a child. And his manner toward her was that of an older brother. That night, for the first time, he had treated her almost as an equal in years and experience. But that, Anne had suspected, was because he was scarcely aware of her as a person. His thoughts turned in upon his own unhappiness; he was scarcely aware of anything except that he had loved Janet and lost her. And that he was torn, and racked and hurting with emotions that refused to accept the facts as they were.
"But I guess I'll get over it," he had said finally, with a ghost of a smile. "I'm not the first guy to lose the girl he wanted. And if all those other guys got over it in time, I guess I will too." Yet he hadn't sounded as if he really believed what he said.
With some vague idea of cheering him up, Anne had told him: "You make me sick, Kenny Wilcox. Going around sounding as if you'd lost your last friend. If I were a man, and a girl gave me the kind of a dirty deal that Janet gave you, I wouldn't give her a second thought. And if I did, I'd just hate myself for being such a weak, silly, spineless, lovesick idiot."
Somewhat intrigued by this outburst, Kenny had grinned at her. He had really grinned, for the first time in days. "What would you do, Miss Smarty? You just tell me that. If you were a man, Miss Smarty, and this happened to you, what would you do?"
"I'd go right out and find somebody else to fall in love with, that's what I'd do."
An idea worth some thought, Kenny had agreed promptly. Then he had given Anne a curious look and he had said a curious thing: "But you're still too young, Anne. That's the whole trouble. You're still too young."
She had given him a look out of startled eyes. "What do you mean, I'm too young?"
"Just what I say, honey. If I can't have Janet, you're my next best bet. But you're only sixteen. I'll tell you what, Anne. You hurry up and grow up a few more years. When you are about twenty, we'll talk this thing over again."
Kenny had been a little late living up to that promise. He had waited until her twenty-first birthday to ask Anne to marry him. That had been a little over a month ago.
"It was that terrible war," Nellie was saying, just as she'd said at the time of Janet's marriage and, never really having reconciled, had reiterated a thousand times since.
Having heard it so often, Anne knew that little refrain by heart: Wars always led to so many impulsive marriages that were doomed from their very inception, and that's what had happened to Janet. Her head had been completely turned by so much attention from the officers in that training camp nearby. There had been so many men falling madly in love with her. Remember that Christmas Eve dance at the Officers' Club when she had been voted the most beautiful girl in Virginia, and received three proposals of marriage that very same night?
"So what?" Anne wanted to scream.
Nellie never wearied of living over Janet's little triumphs and Anne had been sick of hearing about them from the very start. Five years of repetition. It was like nagging at a nerve worn raw. Janet was so popular- Janet had so many admirers-Janet was so beautiful-Janet, Janet, Janet.
What girl wouldn't be sick of it?
Especially when it was impossible to miss the not-too-well hidden implication: What a pity you can't be the popular beauty your sister was! Oh, Nellie had never said that in so many words. But Anne knew! She knew that it was in her mother's mind, and that most of the town probably agreed with her.
Her breakfast finished, Anne saw no point in prolonging the conversation. It was already after nine. Nellie, every inch the southern lady complete with Virginia accent, soft pretty hands that disliked menial work, and an inborn conviction that a real lady shouldn't go running off to an office at the stroke of nine, had never taken Anne's job as secretary to a lawyer very seriously.
But Anne took it seriously, and it was time for her to be getting off. Her mother, she knew, would be perfectly willing to keep her sitting here the whole morning, recalling Janet's past triumphs, holding post-mortems over the marriage which should never have been.
Anne folded the heavy linen napkin, smiling to herself as she did so. It had taken literally years to persuade Nellie to breakfast in this sunny kitchen nook, deserting the large and somewhat dismal dining room for all meals except dinner. But to fall so low as to use paper napkins, which could be so easily crumpled and discarded, never. There was, she always contended, something definitely common-at any rate, unpleasantly suggestive of a lack of sensitivity-about paper napkins. For outdoor picnics, yes. But to be used on her own lovely table that was invariably set, even in the kitchen, with the family sterling and the crystal goblets?
Oh, no. Nellie would flinch, with an expression faintly resembling pain, at the very thought.
And if her mother was so completely unrealistic about a little thing like paper napkins, how could anyone expect her to be realistic about Janet, who, since her father's death nearly eleven years ago, had been the apple of Nellie's eye?
Anne thought, a little ashamed of her own suppressed resentments: I shouldn't get upset because Mother adores Janet the way she does. Nellie Veigh by nature was drawn to beauty and daintiness. Even in their younger years her imagined ideal girl was the old-fashioned southern belle-exquisitely beautiful, gay, charming, thoughtless of the more serious things of life. In short, a breathtaking beauty to whom the world was a collection of admirers swarming around her, like moths to a flame. And Janet was just such a person.
While as for herself, Anne thought, quite honestly, I'm just a quiet, mousy little person with no looks to speak of. Never in a thousand years would it occur to anyone to vote her a Virginia beauty. And as for receiving three proposals of marriage in an evening, it had taken twenty-one years and a lot of praying and hoping for her to get just one proposal of marriage! A thought which amused her momentarily, until she remembered that it was Janet whom Kenny had loved first.
He had admitted to Anne, no longer ago than the night when he asked her to marry him, that when Janet jilted him it had nearly killed him.
Grinning ruefully: "I was like the guy in that corny old song: A Fool There Was. Couldn't eat, couldn't sleep, dreamed about the gal when I did sleep, and actually gave a lot of concentrated thought to killing myself. Oh, it hit me hard, all right, but finally I grew up and got to be a big boy. Finally I got over it."
Had he gotten over it?
Anne knew now, facing the prospect of Janet's return, that she had never been really sure. And when Janet came back and indicated that her marriage was not going smoothly, what would happen?
How would Kenny feel when he saw her again, knowing that maybe it still was not too late? The very thought was like a clammy hand of fear laid on her heart.
And out of the fear, the angry resentment spurted up again, unbidden, irrepressible, and it made her eyes hard and unsympathetic as she pushed back her chair and heard her mother still talking about that other war, the parade of Janet's triumphs: "I never could understand what possessed her to settle on Bob Thompson when she had so many other chances. She was the most popular girl in this town. It was a rare thing when there wasn't some young officer waiting in the parlor for her. Or out on the front porch. Often as not, there would be three or four of them waiting together, and all looking daggers at each other. The flowers used to simply pour in. And candy! Just pounds and pounds and pounds of it. I -used to have to give it away to the neighbors. And when one of the boys would be transferred, out west or wherever, then the telegrams would start coming. And the long-distance phone ringing."
"I'm sick of it! Do you hear me, Mother? I'm sick and tired and fed up with hearing about all the men who were in love with Janet during the last war. I'm sick of hearing about Janet's beauty and Janet's popularity. I'm just sick of hearing about Janet, period."
Anne stood up, and her eyes blazed with the stormy resentment, partly a sense of injustice, which had been smoldering in her for years. Years? For practically all of her life. For since she was a toddling baby, just beginning to understand words, there had never been a time when the beauty of her older sister was not being constantly thrown up to her.
It had been a long time ago-she could have been no more than seven or eight at the time, but she could still remember, as clearly as if it were yesterday-that she had heard a low-spoken conversation between her mother and father. Anne had stood, her ear pressed to the closed folding doors between the front and back parlors, and those words, idly spoken, had taken root in her young brain like tough, ugly, indestructible weeds.
"Anne is such a plain child compared with Janet. Honestly, Tom, no one would take them for sisters. Such a pity! Life is so much easier for a girl with beauty."
"I wouldn't be so sure about Anne's plainness, Nellie." Even when she was a baby, her daddy had been the one whom Anne adored. Right then, her heart seemed about to burst with gratitude as well as tenderness for him. For with those words he seemed to offer her a fighting chance at life and happiness, the chance at her woman's birthright, of which her mother would have robbed her in the space of a breath.
"There's something about Anne's face. She will never possess the more obvious kind of good looks which hit you in the eye, but there is more than one kind of beauty, Nellie. Anne's face has a kind of spiritual quality, and as she grows older I think it will intensify. I daresay there will be many who will miss it altogether, but I also predict there will be those who will consider her the more beautiful of the two girls.
"What's more," he had added, after a moment's thought, "there's a lot more to our little Anne than mere superficial prettiness. You mark my words, we'll be proud of that little girl someday."
Well, Tom Veigh hadn't lived to find out whether he'd have reason to be especially proud of his Anne or not. He'd gone before his time-the victim of one of those careless accidents which never should have happened. But to Anne, the one who had been inconsolable in her young grief and her first experience with deep sorrow, he would always be the human being she had loved most dearly. And those words he had spoken, way back in the past, had helped to keep him alive in her heart.
Whenever she felt hurt, or put upon by some favoritism shown Janet, she would remember her father's deep love for her, his many little manifestations of affection. He had been a demonstrative man, never ashamed of showing love and tenderness. And she would remember the words he had said that day: "There will be those who will, consider Anne very beautiful."
Well, he had been wrong about that. No one had ever called her beautiful, nor had she ever accomplished anything to make anyone especially proud of her.
She seemed to have remained much as she had been as a little girl-quiet, unobtrusive, never one to push herself, well-liked by everyone in town, especially by older people, because she always tried to be thoughtful and considerate of others. Alex Brooks said she was the best secretary he had ever had.
So her father had been wrong, after all. Except that he had made her feel beautiful, important and wanted as no one else had ever done. When things were hard, when she was hurt, her mind would rush to her memories of him and it was like touching a loving, bolstering hand.
There had been many a time when, just thinking of him and of his tenderness, she had been able to force back angry, rebellious, bitter words which beat at her to be spoken. But he was no help now.
Now, for the very first time, as she stood there facing her mother's startled, bewildered eyes, she allowed the full, frantic torrent of her rebellious spirit to possess her and to flow out of her in words she should have said years ago.
Her hands gripped the back of her chair and her head was flung a little back. "All my life I've had Janet's looks flung in my face. Do you remember the very first words you ever taught me to say, Mother? Do you? 'My sister Janet is beautiful.' You made me say it over and over and over and over. Remember, Mother?
"I learned it in the cradle, from you. Later on, I had to listen to it everywhere I turned. What a beautiful girl your sister is. Janet looked beautiful as an angel on the Sunday she took her first communion. Janet, such a beautiful girl graduate. Janet, the loveliest bride you ever saw. Janet-what a beautiful mother she will make, a regular Madonna. Only Janet fooled them there. Janet isn't ready to be a mother. She isn't even ready to be a wife. She misses the excitement of being dated and admired by a different worshipping male each night. She misses the candy and the flowers and the telephone calls and the attention she received as a glamour girl."
She flung the words straight in her mother's face. Mrs. Veigh had turned pale. She seemed to be struggling between amazement at Anne's unexpected outburst and hurt shock that such unkind things should be said about Janet.
"Oh, I know you'll hate me for saying this, Mother. But I know Janet better than you do. You don't know her at all. You simply worship at her shrine. I say that Janet is a self-centered creature who simply must be admired by every man she comes in contact with. As a wife, she can't expect to have men swooning at her feet. And she's bored now without it. That's the reason she's breaking up with Bob.
"Don't tell me that Bob has been unkind and cruel to her, because I don't believe a word of it. Bob is the gentlest soul who ever lived. He couldn't be unkind to a girl even if he hated her, and he worshipped Janet. You know it.
"Janet is coming home for just one reason. Married life provides her with but one admirer and Janet still hasn't lost her yen to be the belle of the ball!"
Suddenly she was like a clock that had run down. Her outburst was over as abruptly as it had started. She looked at her mother who sat, tight-lipped, shocked, still too bewildered to think what to say. "I'm sorry, Mother." Her apology was little more than a whisper.
Then she turned and walked out of the kitchen.
She went up to her bedroom. She would have to bathe her eyes and put on fresh lipstick before she went to the office. She stood for a moment before her dressing table mirror.
The girl who looked back at her, if not spectacularly beautiful, had a very real charm that was singularly her own. Her hair was an off-shade of gold, and her eyes, gravely thoughtful, were such a deep, shining blue that they were often taken for black. Her lips were wide and sweetly curved, and her smile was warm and genuine. A startling beauty? No. In all honesty, she wasn't.
But Tom Veigh had been right, years ago, when he had said that Anne's face possessed some peculiar arresting quality of loveliness. It was an elusive quality, not to be measured in terms of the color of her eyes nor the shape of her nose. But it was a loveliness that came from something deep within her. A clean, delicate, glowing type of beauty that was covered by Anne's shyness and lack of confidence. But someday it would burst forth and she would emerge into a truly beautiful girl.
However, few people saw any of this in Anne, and certainly she saw none of it in herself. She had never looked more plain to herself than she did at that moment. She studied herself briefly and without enthusiasm, reddened her lips, straightened her white silk blouse, and turned away from the mirror.
Already she was regretting her impulsive outburst. But every word that I said was true, she reminded herself. Or was it? Had she said less than the truth, or more? Quickly her uncertain mind threw up the doubts that had been waiting right along to hound her. Ten days ago she had written Janet about her engagement to Kenny. Could that be the thing that was bringing Janet back with such alarming suddenness?
Was she breaking up with Bob, rushing home with her marriage in ruins behind her, to get Kenny back again before it was too late? Or to try to?
And if it were that? What about Kenny? Would he be willing to be drawn back into the pretty web she would try to weave? Had he ever really gotten over the girl whom he had loved so deeply and who, in jilting him, had made him suffer so much?
"Oh, I'm over Janet." Any number of times he had reassured Anne on that point. "Why, it's hard for me to remember exactly what she looked like. Isn't that enough proof? Every guy has to have a girl in his past-the first girl he fell for-and that's what Janet means to me. That's all she means to me, believe me. I hardly ever think about her anymore, and when I do, it's just to recall some silly thing that happened between us. No, darling, you're my girl now. You're the girl in my present, the only girl I want in my future. Isn't that good enough to suit you?"
Anne went slowly down the curved stairway, her hand trailing the lovely old mahogany banister railing. Her eyes were wide and far away. Oh, that was good enough, surely: to be the girl in Kenny's present and future was plenty good enough-if only it were true! But was it? How could Kenny himself know that was true? How could he possibly know what he would feel, what long-buried emotions might rush to quick and demanding life when he saw Janet again?
But I'll know, Anne thought. I'll know the minute I see him look at her. Then, as she reached the lower hallway, the phone rang.
"I'll answer it," Anne called to her mother. The phone alcove, partially hidden under the stairway, had once been a large closet. As Anne walked back to it, she knew who would be calling. She knew what she was going to hear, before she ever lifted the receiver from its cradle.
"Anne? Ken speaking."
Ken speaking! The very formality of those words sent a shiver of foreboding through her. As if she wouldn't be expected to recognize the voice of the boy she had known her whole life-the voice of the man she still hoped she was going to marry.
"Well-" a thread of mockery appeared in her tone-"aren't we formal this morning? It's a wonder you wouldn't inform me it was Dr. Wilcox calling."
She heard his laugh. The quick, deep, soft, throaty laugh which did things to her heart and always had. "I'm talking from the phone in the waiting room, and the room is crowded with patients. I was hoping I'd catch you before you left for the office. Look, Anne, how about lunch together?"
"Something important?" Anne asked quickly. A natural question, since Kenny made a rule of avoiding luncheon engagements. He never quite knew when he could get away from his offices which were, in a very small way, a clinic. Nor could he ever tell in advance what emergency calls might come up.
Then, with a quick tightening of her throat, Anne heard him laugh again. And this time was it tinged with embarrassment? Or was that simply her imagination playing tricks on her? She thought not.
"Well, I suppose you might say it is important. Fact is, I just had a letter from Janet. Quite a surprise. I wanted to talk it over with you."
Anne's voice came quietly, under perfect control. "Okay, Kenny. I'll meet you at one o'clock sharp. In front of Gordon's Grill? Fine. Be seeing you, darling."
She cradled the phone. She let her hands fall, crossed, in her lap. Then, for a solid three minutes, she sat staring at nothing at all.
It was all happening again.
Janet was coming back and things were going to be the way they used to. Anne bit her lip. She could remember very well how things were, and it didn't please her.
Anne remembered one summer evening. She had been in her room, listening to the radio. Janet had a date with Kenny that night, and when they returned, at about eleven o'clock, Janet checked in with her mother and then joined Kenny on the front porch.
Anne was bored. She went downstairs and found that her mother had gone to bed. She prepared a sandwich and was about to go back to her room when she heard Janet giggling.
"Shush," Kenny said. "Don't wake anyone up!"
Anne froze. Then she crept to the back door, went outside, and circled the house. Kenny and Janet were sitting on the rocker, and Anne hid in the bushes and watched them, her mouth dry with tension.
Then she saw what was going on. Janet had unfastened Kenny's pants and was handling his penis. No one walking down the street could see anything. A high hedge hid Kenny and Janet from prying eyes. But from Anne's position, she could see everything.
Janet was smiling, and she was stroking his member-Anne had never seen anything so big in her life! Kenny was grinning too, but it was a self-conscious expression.
Then Janet leaned over, her head poised above the puckered tip of his penis. "Do it," Kenny urged. "Go ahead and suck my dick." There was a look of desperation in his eyes.
Janet giggled softly and then her tongue darted out and licked the pale flesh at the end of his pecker. She snaked her tongue up and darted into the tiny opening on his tip. Kenny squirmed with pleasure as his hands held Janet's face at his throbbing erection.
"That's right," urged Kenny. "Just a little bit at a time. If you work at it slowly you'll soon be able to swallow the whole thing."
The scene before Anne made her feel a tinge of sexy mildew seep into her womb. She was open-mouthed and panting. She had never seen anything like this in her life!
She watched as Janet sucked over the head of Kenny's big white prick. She was amazed at the way her sister formed a purse with her face to nuzzle the shaft sticking in her mouth. Anne felt a tingling as she watched Janet bob her face along the inches of taut, wet foreskin. Though the act looked repulsive to her, she was nonetheless fascinated.
Janet then gobbled in about half of Kenny's fat prick. Her lips pursed and wet the skin, rubbing it eagerly. She pulled back off with a fat, wet snap.
Anne looked on and wondered what it all tasted like.
Janet's head was bobbing up and down like a duck on a windy pond. Kenny lay back and moaned, closing his eyes and rolling his head.
"Oh Janet," he sighed. "You suck me so well. Keep doing it just like you are."
That stimulated the girl he was cradling in his hands. She lifted her head from his palms and tried to gobble down his whole nine-inch-long prick. When she got close to the bottom she started gagging. The tip of his hard cock was stabbing at the rear of her throat. It was so big and long that it felt like it would choke her.
"Careful baby... just calm down," soothed Kenny. "Just wait and work at it and you'll be able to get every inch of my cock down your throat."
Janet's head was bobbing up and down and pretty soon her anxious gurgling had Kenny's legs shaking with pleasure.
"You do it sooo well!!" he sighed to her.
Janet grabbed one of his hands and put it against her breast. Kenny began to grab at the hearty tit, manipulating the flesh underneath. He could hear the coarse sound of Janet's labored breathing.
Anne watched as her sister cocked her little head around and went at his tall slab sideways. Janet's little mouth gobbled and grabbed at the flesh, trying to pull that in so the meat would naturally follow.
She was soon pushing her head up and down in a sideways path that made Kenny's cock ripple with pleasure.
With a loud gulp his cock slipped down her throat. Anne stared in wild disbelief as Janet shoved the pecker into her throat. Her body contorted and writhed, and her arms wiggled like the wings of a dying chicken. All Anne could hear was her moaning and choking.
"Get ready," whispered Kenny. "My balls are about to spill their load."
Janet wasn't about to stop. She increased her oral action, plumbing with her mouth the whole length of his manhood. She swallowed it from the stinging tip to the burning base, screwing her head about to slide it down her throat.
By then Kenny squirmed too. Suddenly he relaxed, smiling, and felt the hot treasure purse through his loins and gush into Janet's eagerly waiting mouth.
Anne could see Kenny's hips buck as Janet was swallowing, taking all his hot pearly juice down her throat. Anne was tempted and hot in her box, and wanted to see what Kenny's jizm looked like. She dared not think of it-but she also wanted a taste.
She got her glimpse. Janet pulled her face off the pecker and grabbed it with her hands. Then she squeezed one last gooey shot out of him and let it drip down into her waiting mouth.
Anne looked at the white, almost clear gob of semen. To her it looked sticky and disgusting. She wondered how Janet could swallow the stuff.
"MMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!" moaned Kenny in appreciation. "You sure know how to suck my cock, Janet. I guess I'm going to have to return the favor."
"How will you do that?" giggled Janet coyly.
"I'm going to eat your juicy little pussy," he said brazenly. Anne couldn't believe her ears.
She looked at Janet, who after her sucking spree was already red and flushed. The idea of Kenny licking her muff brought a crimson glow to her face. She knew it would feel embarrassingly erotic.
Janet hopped up onto the rocking chair and spread her legs. Over them was a wide and long dress that hung below her knees. She giggled as Kenny rolled onto the floor and stuck his face up under her dress like he was entering a tent.
Anne was disappointed. She wanted to see what happened when he sucked and chewed at Janet's pussy. She was not to be disappointed for long.
As she watched wide-eyed she saw Kenny lift up her sister's skirt until her whole bottom was bare. Underneath he struggled to pull off her panties.
Anne was fascinated by the look of Janet's heaving quim. It was fat, fleshy and curled, a round and bounteous mound of curls and creamy tissues.
Her own pussy was smaller, more compact. She stiffened as her fingers slid up the slit and fingered about trying to snake out a difference between her and her sister's.
By now Anne was sighing deeply, hidden in the bushes, heaving with passion. But nothing compared to what was going on inside. Kenny ran his tongue up and down the face of Janet's fat and fleshy slit. The girl wiggled and cooed.
"OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO KENNY!!" she cried like a shocked belle.
Anne could hear him respond as his tongue slapped about Janet's flesh and juices.
Anne fingered her rubbery quim and wondered what it felt like to have her cunt licked. Sure, she had played with herself. But the very thought of a soft and nuzzling mouth breathing hard on her pussy made her spin.
By now Kenny was reaming Janet's crotch, licking the folds and hole from top to bottom. Janet bounced about happily, letting out little cries of passion and satisfaction.
Then Kenny got up and grabbed his sturdy meat. He climbed onto the rocker and shoved it into Janet's grateful and itching cunt. It swished in with a wet and mushy sound.
The sight made Anne cringe and swoon.
Kenny slid into Janet until he was all the way up to his hips. Janet cried out as he jabbed at the bottom of her wet and burning center.
"UUUUUUUGGGGGGHHHHHH KENNY!!!! YOU'RE SOOOOOO BIG!!!! FUCK ME GOOOOOD!!!" she begged him.
From her angle in the bushes all Anne had to do was shift her head to get a glimpse of Kenny's shaft splitting open her sister's bottom. She could see the quim quiver and wrinkle as the big love log rammed into it. Then Janet lifted her legs and locked them around Kenny's waist, letting him plunge into her as deeply and powerfully as she could urge him.
Anne could now survey the whole scene- his bulging peckerhead jabbing into the hole, the shaft growing wetter and slimier as it pushed the juices from the fleshy slit, the slapping of his balls on Janet's rear. To her it looked so crazy and animalistic. But the way it made her itching insides feel, especially when she fingered and rubbed her now gushing vaginal orifice.
Janet was writhing away in ecstasy, and cried out mightily when she hit her peak. "OOOOOOOOO ... I'M COMING!!!" she let out in a stifled whoop, hoping she wouldn't wake the family.
Just then Kenny grunted and dropped his sticky love bomb in her womb. They heaved and sighed for a few more seconds, then quietly fell together.
Then Anne crept back into the house.
When she was back up in her room the scene she had just witnessed bothered her, and she became aware that her body was growing warm. Sitting on the hassock beside her dressing table, she sudden found herself making a small sound... a whimper of desire. She reached under her skirt and seized the elastic waistband of her panties and slid the white, chaste garment over her buttocks and thighs and dropped it to the floor.
She stretched her arms and wriggled her behind on the soft, padded seat of the hassock. She squeezed her thighs together, remembering, and felt her wet vaginal lips compressing, slewing against each other as she increased the pressure. Her clitoris twitched, tensed, slid outward. She crossed one thigh over the other, trying to ward off the lusty feeling that was taking her. She screwed her eyes shut, and threw herself on the bed. One by one she shed every garment that covered her body. With hungry fingers, and remembering Kenny's huge cock, her picture of it vivid, she inserted a stiff finger in the wet orifice and seized the skidding tip of her clit with the convulsive grip of finger and thumb. Automatically her left hand moved to milk the aching desire from the hot, hardened nipple of her breast. Her other hand fingered the clit madly. Her mind went white-hot, and she slowly combed all ten fingers through the matted hair and new shocks of excitement shot to her brain. She pictured herself tasting that cock, licking at it. Her fingers toured the crevice again and again. Fantasy built with fact and coaxed the spark inside her to flame. The finger played tag with her burning vagina, teasing it thrillingly, two fingers now probing her to higher delights- girl juices drooling throughout it all- magically.
Anne humped on the bed like that until she had sweat a big wet pool of juices underneath her ass. Her body was now loose and shaking, her pussy dripping and heaving, contorted and excited by her explorations.
As she fell asleep she felt her pussy gurgling and twisting.
Later in the night it twisted and heaved again. She was in a beautiful place in her dream, a lovely open field dotted with trees. She lay naked by a stream, on a blanket.
The scene was what had transpired before she dropped off to sleep with a double-force intensity. She had all the fingers of her right hand jerking into her wet, velvety sheath, itching at a scratch inside her womb that mere fingers couldn't touch.
Her left hand pinched at her nipple and rolled it about, pressing the spongy flesh of her melon flat to her chest.
She lay on the blanket humping her hips, which sweated a flow of sweet, honeyed juices, while her upper body wriggled and bucked. She lay in the sun and got hotter and hotter.
Her eyes were closed and her mind was lost in an onrush of crazy, swift passions.
She heard a rustle beside her and opened her eyes.
She was shocked, and happily surprised. It was Kenny. In his hands he held a massive, juicy hard-on.
She brought her hands up and grasped it firmly, savoring the taut flesh and the firm ripeness of his erection. She lifted herself up to the pecker and kissed it.
She then went at it just like her sister did, licking it, then sucking it in and taking it all the way her throat. She gobbled on the meaty length of manhood-trying to give him all the pleasure she could with her mouth.
But of course, she wanted him to fuck her. Not just to put that fleshy shaft into her tight and ticklish quim, but to thrust his manliness as far as he could up into her body. She wanted to be fucked raw and powerfully.
Kenny obliged her. He crawled between the girl's legs and pushed them apart as wide as they went, opening her whole womb up to his incoming slab.
When he first shoved it in, Anne felt her whole bottom heave and quiver with pain. It was so big that it wrenched her apart, spreading the tight tunnel until it felt like it was ripping to shreds.
Down and down he pushed, even though Anne was gasping what sounded like her last breaths. But in a few minutes, the pecker was quickly jabbing and thrusting her pouting lips to orgasmic explosions.
She awoke in a wet sweat.
CHAPTER TWO
Alex Brooks, at thirty-eight, was the dark, dashing, definitely he-man type, and still looked in his very early thirties. He was generally regarded as the most eligible bachelor in Hillview. Unfortunately, from every standpoint but his own, he was also the most elusive one.
"I am waiting," Alex would say, grinning, "for my ideal girl to come along." Pinned down, he would elaborate, still in that humorous tone.
His ideal must excel all others in beauty, charm, intellect, and character. She must not only be able to wear clothes like a Vogue model but also make apple pies the way his mother used to make them.
Since, obviously, no such paragon of perfection existed anywhere outside of his imagination, it was simply another way of saying that Alex had no intention of marrying at all.
Still, the mothers of Hillview's marriageable daughters remained hopeful. They had been so for nearly ten years, ever since Alice Jordan, the girl whom Alex had loved deeply, had been taken suddenly ill and died. It all happened suddenly and tragically.
All the girls in town were infatuated with him but one-Anne. She was his secretary, and a damn good one as far as Alex was concerned. They worked well together, and Alex had once told her that she was the only secretary he'd ever had who didn't get on his nerves.
He'd tried to get her interested in him in a social way, but it was no use trying. She just wasn't going to fall. For a guy as desirable as Alex Brooks, that was just a little bit frustrating.
But the next morning was not Anne's day. Usually prompt and alert, she arrived at work at nearly ten-thirty, acting as though her job were the last and least important thing in her life. Alex was even surprised that she answered him sarcastically when he asked why she was late.
He came back into her outer office a little later determined to find out what was wrong. The evidence was all over the letter she'd just typed.
"Anne, this is the messiest piece of typing that I've ever seen-three erasures in one line. This letter can't go out and you know it. Let up, girl. Something's eating you. What's wrong?"
"Please Alex, leave me alone. I'm okay. It's just a headache."
He walked around and straddled the edge of her desk. "Come on, Anne. Spill it. And there's no use pretending there isn't something upsetting on your mind. I know you too well."
She looked up at him then, and he saw the troubled unhappiness in her midnight-blue eyes, saw her mouth working before she managed to say: "It's nothing, really. Only I'm such an idiot. That's all, Alex. Truly. Just that I haven't very much sense. We heard from Janet this morning. She's breaking up with Bob, coming home. And I-Kenny-"
"And you're afraid that Kenny is still in love with her." Alex let her have it, like a knife thrust straight at the heart of an already quivering wound.
"Yes," Anne said stiffly.
Not another soul would have won that quick, all-embracing admission from her. But Alex was different. Her confidences were safe with Alex, and she could trust him not to humiliate her with pity nor to try to bolster her up with pretty little flattering lies.
"Well, you're crazy," Alex said finally, "if that's all you can find to worry about."
He added savagely: "If Kenny Wilcox is still fool enough to prefer Janet to you-and I don't believe for one minute that he does or will-than he isn't worth bothering about."
"But you know how it was with them," Anne said seriously. "For a while Janet was wildly in love with Kenny."
"Rubbish. Janet was never in love with anyone except Janet."
"Well, Kenny was crazy in love with her. That you can't deny."
"Puppy love," said Alex scornfully.
"Perhaps. But what was puppy love yesterday might still be the love of a grown man today. I guess it's just that I've never been really sure that Kenny ever got over Janet. Maybe I'm just dreaming up trouble and I hope it turns out that way. Maybe it's just that I've always been jealous of Janet and that's a thing I'm ashamed to confess. I wouldn't admit it to anyone but you, Alex. I don't want people to know I'm so-so small and despicable. I thought I had gotten over it."
How many times, this last year or so, she had smiled over her childish envy of Janet, over the many small irritations, half-forgotten now, at hearing people say: "Well, I guess poor Anne's nose is out of joint, what with Janet getting so much attention." A baby crying and raging because the other sister held the limelight. That was what it had all amounted to. And thank heavens she had grown out of it, grown up. Secure in her own right, secure in the love of the man to whom her own heart belonged so utterly.
Only she hadn't been secure at all, and it had been a shock to learn it. She was not really grown up, and she felt no real security in Kenny's love. With nothing more alarming to go on than the rearing heads of her own foolish fears, she seemed to feel disaster swooping down on her.
Alex shook his head sorrowfully. "Too bad. Such a sensible girl in so many ways. Such a little nitwit in others. Know your whole trouble, my pretty pet? You have the world's worst inferiority feelings."
"Who wouldn't have?" said Anne, not denying it. "I'm not beautiful. I possess no irresistible charm for men. When I wear a new dress, no one ever notices it. No matter what I wear, or what I do, or where I go, or whom I meet, I'm just the same old Anne. Such a nice girl. Such a sweet girl. Such a sensible girl." There was venom in the words, and Alex threw back his head and shouted with laughter, which made her furious.
"Go on. Laugh at me. Laugh your head off. I know I'm funny."
"Sure you are, honey, very funny when you explode like that. Any second now I expect to see you spitting fire."
"Well, you wouldn't find it very funny, Alex Brooks, if you were me. It isn't a bit funny to be a mousy female who looks as if she'd been born into this world to spend gay, riotous evenings as a babysitter or something. And what's more-" Alex exploded with laughter again. Then, seriously, he asked her: "Do you mean to tell me that you believe all that rot you've been saying?"
Why wouldn't she believe it? Anne demanded. Didn't the record of her whole life prove her point?
Had there ever been a line of men forming to the right at her door, begging for dates with her?
Had anybody ever voted her Beautiful Miss Anything?
Had men ever tossed their breaking hearts under her heel and told her to go ahead and finish up the job of trampling over them?
"I've heard enough," said Alex firmly.
If she must chatter such absurd nonsense, she should go home and shut herself up in her own room and chatter to herself. "You should consult a psychoanalyst," he advised her solemnly. "It's too big a job for me to attempt. I don't feel equal to it, although I recognize the need."
He shook his head, his eyes watching her. "Good Lord. For my money, you have far more claim to genuine beauty than Janet. Although I'll grant you this much-you do nothing to bring it out. But it's there and you needn't laugh. If you won't take my word for it, you might cast your harassed little mind back to a certain artist, Julian Lowry by name.
"Remember Julian, honey? Well, do you? Remember what happened when Julian came to Hillview for the summer and all the eager mamas were after him to do pictures of their daughters? Remember, Anne?"
Julian Lowry! Anne remembered very well. Briefly, Julian had made people sit up and take notice of her. An artist, still fairly young, but doing work that promised serious recognition one of these days. He had come to Hillview under doctor's orders to let down and take it easy for three or four months.
Unwilling, or perhaps temperamentally incapable of spending week after week doing nothing, he had decided to do one painting during his vacation period. Something to be included in the one-man exhibit he was planning to give in New York within the next year. He had proved, however, extremely finicky and choosy about his model. None of the recognized beauties of the town seemed to suit him, but when he had discovered Anne one day, by sheer accident, he had walked over to her, introduced himself, and three days later Anne had found herself sitting as his model in the room he had rented and rigged up as a temporary studio.
She gave Alex a rueful grin. "So Julian wanted to do my portrait. And what does that prove? He talked a lot about the planes of my face, about my being a type. But even he never claimed that I was any beauty." She laughed. "He made me loosen my hair; then he put a yellow scarf around my neck, stuck a red rose in my hand and came up with a picture that didn't look an awful lot like me."
"Maybe it looked more like you than you look like yourself, Anne," Alex said slowly.
"What a curious thing to say, Alex. And anyway-" Anne frowned, remembering her feeling of vague disappointment when Julian had let her take her first look at the finished canvas. "I never cared a lot for the picture."
"I did," Alex declared. "I thought it was lovely. I liked it so well that I made up my mind to own it some day."
"You're just saying that. It isn't like you, Alex, to feed me pretty lies to bolster up my ego. That, of course, is what you're trying to do."
"Am I?" He studied her thoughtfully, then went abruptly back to his own office. He returned with a letter which he told Anne to read. It was an acknowledgment of a letter from himself, under the letterhead of a famous New York gallery. It said that his check had been received, in payment for the painting by Julian Lowry, "Girl In A Yellow Scarf," which had recently won a prize in a showing by this artist. The painting would be transmitted to him in due course.
"You mean," said Anne, unbelieving, "that you've actually bought that picture?"
"I've bought it," Alex said emphatically. "I mean to hang it in my study, where I can look at it often. I mean to keep it always, and as you know, I'm not the kind of a guy who wants a place cluttered up with works of art. That painting is alive, and that's what I like about it. It caught your expression so completely that when I looked at it I felt as if you were smiling straight at me, getting ready to speak."
He said: "In a sense, it's more alive than you yourself are, Anne. It has a vitality which you seem to keep under lock and key. The eyes in it have a warmth and longing which you must feel, but don't want anyone to see or know about." He said: "To me it is very lovely, and so are you, Anne. So are you."
For a moment their eyes met squarely. Then Anne laughed. "Such a conversation," she said lightly. "And right in the middle of a busy morning with both of our desks cluttered with work to be done."
"Hang the work."
Many times, in the past, they had had personal conversations. But never one quite like this. Very carefully, in his relations with girls, even with Anne who had his complete confidence, Alex avoided the intense, too personal note. Yet now Anne didn't know what to make of him. Why should he have wanted to possess that picture of her? A passing whim? Possibly. He was not wealthy, yet neither did he have to consider the dimes and dollars. Once, Anne knew, he had bought a vase of antique ruby glass, because the lovely shade of it had intrigued him. Yet later, disliking the shape, he had donated it to a rummage sale. Would the painting of herself end up at a rummage sale?
Intrigued, faintly amused at that prospect, she suggested it, laughing, and Alex astonished her by asserting angrily: "Sometimes I get completely out of patience with you, Anne. Do you get some neurotic pleasure out of cheapening and minimizing yourself?"
He lit a fresh cigarette, paced scowlingly back and forth across the small room, exhaling smoke in a blue cloud. Then, smearing out the cigarette on a tray, he walked around to her and stood very close, leaning down with his hands on her shoulders. "Look here, Anne, tell me the truth. Are you serious in believing that Kenny may still be in love with Janet? Or are you simply dreaming up something to worry about?"
"I'm very serious," Anne told him. "And I don't believe I'm simply inventing something to worry about. I haven't any doubts but that Kenny does love me. But is he in love with me the way he once was with Janet?" She shook her head. "I just don't know and I have very strong doubts. I can't help remembering how he was about her, and he didn't care who knew it." Her smile was small, wistful. "He's never acted the least bit excited about me. He's fond of me, in a quiet sort of way-we're the best of friends, we have fun together, and I think I could have made him happy, if Janet weren't coming back into the picture."
She sighed. "But Janet is coming back."
"And you think, in his heart, Kenny is still in love with her."
Anne managed a jerky laugh. "I wouldn't bet against it." She was silent, then spoke. "I've about decided to return Kenny's ring, tell him all bets are off. I won't put myself through a lot of torture, just wondering what Kenny is thinking. I might just as well break off now and get it over with."
Alex seemed to approve, up to a point. "However," he warned her, "you don't want to put yourself in the light of a meek, self-effacing little thing, who knows your place is in the background when the family beauty is returning. If you're going to break the engagement, honey, do it with gestures and an air. Don't tell Kenny you're stepping out because you think he doesn't want you any more; let him think there's someone else you want. Tell him there's another man in your life."
"But there isn't." Then, staring straight into his eyes, she felt amazement or shock quicken her blood. Her face, whitening, went even whiter when she heard him saying: "Tell him you want to be freed from your promise to him because you want to marry me.
Then, his hands tightening on her shoulders, his eyes still raking hers, Alex said in an even tone: "Well, how about it? Isn't that an idea? It will save your pride, and," his grin was very faint, "certainly give the town plenty to talk about."
For a moment, too astonished to speak, Anne simply sat and stared back at him. Then, deciding that Alex was having his little joke, she laughed shakily. "My goodness, you had me scared for a minute. I thought you were serious."
"And what makes you so sure that I'm not serious?"
She said quietly, smiling a little: "Now, Alex, I know perfectly well that you have no idea of marrying anyone. Certainly not me. If you're simply offering to let me play at being engaged to you to save my face and my pride-well, that's thoughtful of you. But a little childish, don't you think? And I don't believe it would work because Kenny wouldn't believe it. No one would."
His eyes were still intent on her face, watchful, but by no means cold. He brushed aside her faint: "Let's be sensible and go back to work." He told her: "If you must have it that I'm simply offering you a face-saving, phony engagement, then have it that way. And frankly, I have no idea of breaking down and making ardent love to a girl who is in love with another man. But as a good friend I sincerely advise you not to let Kenny think you are stepping out of his life simply because you think he no longer wants you. And also as a friend-" His tone changed, holding a note she had never heard there before.
He was pulling her to her feet. He actually had his arms around her, and for a second she glimpsed his eyes and the look in them left her shaken, unbelieving. Then she felt his lips, hard and eager against her own.
Then: "Don't be too sure that this is simply a phony engagement I'm offering you, or you may be in for the surprise of your life!"
Anne stared at him. Alex was incredibly handsome, there was no doubt about it. He was older, as well. Able to handle himself in situations like this. He was no kid who was going to go bragging to all the other nitwits about "scoring" with Anne.
She responded quickly, her mouth pressed tightly to his. She knew that it wasn't true love, or anything like it. It was more like pure pleasure.
The moment was right and that was all she cared about. Alex was offering her a moment of pleasure, and she wasn't going to turn him down.
His hands came up and cupped her nice firm breasts. She felt her chest get warm and flow with feelings. He gripped the ripe melons softly, enjoying the flow of her flesh.
Meanwhile her hand was running down the front of his suit, sliding to the mounting bulge in his pants. It was hard for her to resist pulling at the monster when she felt how huge it was even in repose. Her pussy trickled at the thought.
Alex went at her quickly. He slipped down the back of her dress and undid her bra. He had them off in a second.
Anne stood there shivering nakedly as Alex leaned over and licked at her pouting nippies. He grabbed her at the waist and pulled her close, drawing the rippled buds into his mouth. Then he began chewing at the flesh, pulling in ever bigger mouthfuls until he was pulling her whole tit into his mouth.
He pulled back and swung off his coat. Anne unbuttoned his shirt, lovingly grazing his chest and stomach hairs with butterfly kisses as she worked her way down.
Alex dropped off his shirt, and Anne was on her knees. She brought her face to his clothed crotch and followed the line of his prick with her tongue. It was now hard and bulging, and many fat, thick inches long. She bit at it, as if she'd like to rip open the material and suck him right then and there.
She cradled her hand against his bulge and looked up lovingly at Alex. "I bet I know what you'd like to have me do with this... " she bantered at him, batting her lashes.
"Yeah, well there's a lot you can do with it that I'd like," he answered.
"Well right now... " she breathed heavily, "I'm going to suck it!!!"
She opened up his pants and hauled the massive prick out.
She held it out in her hands, inspecting the big tool with a fond gaze.
It was long with white, rippled skin, all of the flesh now stretched tight so that every vein was etched out along the pole. His head was big and bulbous, with a pink tinge that indicated the hot blood racing to his helmet.
Below his pecker swung two beautifully shaped and firm balls, with a thick curly forest of hair covering their bumpy, ridge-laden sac.
Anne kissed the whole of his pubic area, wetting the flesh with soft, damp, and heated little smacks of her mouth. First it was his straight and firm shaft she kissed, holding it to her face with her hand as she went up and down the round thickness.
Then it was his balls she made love to, licking them and pursing her lips to draw the testes into her mouth and suck on them and roll them about.
She emerged from under his tool to return and lick fondly at the bulging peckerhead, swirling about it in a way that stimulated and heated further the already gushing blood inside it.
His whole cock felt like a burning sword that was ready for battle.
"MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!" he moaned to her appreciatively. "I sure wish we'd gotten together like this before. The way you lick my dick is sheer heaven to me."
Anne looked back up at Alex and grinned. She popped the tip of his now quivering rod into her steamy little mouth, sitting there nuzzling the underside into little explosions with her mouth open as she looked at him. He could almost see his sperm come pouring out into her warm mouth.
Then she locked her lips around the shaft and went to the hilt, drawing it and hugging it as she twisted her head back off. She sucked him like that in a glorious frenzy, making his tool all wet and heated.
He felt his balls spurt, and then racing up his pecker came long, sticky lines of his come, laying out across her cheeks and tongue and gumming up the inside of her mouth. She just hummed appreciatively as he spilled it into her, retaining the searing fluids to rub about his loins afterward with her lips.
In fact after he had come Alex found her lip job even more inducing of passionate frenzy. Her lips now had a sticky seal of come that made a bond between his flesh and hers. She really now felt like a vacuum.
After keeping him at correct hardness like that for a minute, Anne released his cock from her mouth and stood up.
"So I do turn you on?" asked Alex.
Anne reached out and stroked the smooth hardness of his penis. "Do you ever!" she said.
He laughed and gripped her around the waist. Then his hand slid into the elastic band of her panties and rolled them down.
Naked, Anne felt as excited as she had ever felt in her life. She blushed, and Alex's mouth covered hers in a hotly passionate kiss.
Then he turned her around and told her to open her legs as she balanced on the desk. She was bent over, resting on her forearms, her legs straight and widespread.
Alex stood behind her and she felt his thick member brush her bottom as he pushed in. Then she was filled with pure delight. She felt herself stretching to accept him, and with one wiggle of her hips he was in all the way.
Then he began a steady series of deep strokes, while his hands came around her body and fondled her aroused and sensitive breasts. She felt as if she could go on forever. Alex was a technician of love, and Anne knew it.
And then she felt his throbber going faster and the answering pleasure of her own body made her groan with delight. She felt the sudden tensing and pleasant thrill of his orgasm filling her completely. She climaxed as well, squealing with pleasure, dizzy with erotic warmth.
They lay in each other's arms for some time after they both came. Anne was amazed that his cock still stayed rock hard in her mushy flesh. It made her tingle with the desire for more sex.
She rustled about underneath him, trying to give him the hint by pulling on his pecker with her insides. Of course, Alex was ready for action.
"You sure are a hot little piece, baby," he said to her. "Who'd have ever known it... "
"Yeah, and this hot little piece wants to get fucked again by the hot big piece of yours."
"Oh yeah!" cried Alex. He loved to tease her. He pulled his cock out of her quivering quim.
"Well," he said. "I'm going to fuck you, but not the way you might be expecting... " Anne felt a shiver come over her body.
"Because," continued Alex, who had now cupped her asscheeks and was lifting her butt up and around, "now I'm going to fuck you in your hot little ass."
The idea made Anne's body cringe with pain and pleasure. She wiggled her bum as Alex spread her cheeks. But when his hot tongue sliced open her bunghole like butter, she knew that she was going to enjoy it.
"Oooooooooooo," she cried, "don't hurt me!!!"
Her rear portal twisted and clasped as Alex buried his tongue in the tight shaft and washed the area with his nibbling. Her rear pounded with sensations, loosening up in anticipation of his hard slab.
He ate her rear like an overripe peach, slobbering juices as he dug his way to some imaginary pit. He nuzzled the splayed muscle until it tingled so badly that it almost wanted his cock.
When the thick tip of his sword touched her rear, Anne whimpered.
"Oh Alex, please be gentle," she asked him. "Your cock is so huge."
He obliged by pressing in at a rate that was so slow and nearly painless that the pleasure was driving Anne mad. He took not an inch by force, instead persuading his way in by applying a constant tension and pressure as his drill ground open the twisted tube.
As it slipped in the muscle wound back around the pecker to choke it. The soft feel of his rod, still wet from pussy juices, massaged the flesh and made it accept him.
By the time he was buried all the way up her rear, Anne felt her whole body tear open and crack with sheets of erotic lightning.
As he drew back out her ass squeezed his cock like a kid spitting out a watermelon seed. As his tip drew back to the portal, Anne felt her muscles twist and convulse. But again Alex smoothly slid back in with a polite but firm stroke.
After persuading and being kind to her ass, Alex finally got deep enough to start punching it to her. Her tight bum rode on his cock, grabbing the skin and tugging it, milking the big hunk until it was heated and trembling.
"OH ALEX!" she cried. "SHOOT IT IN MY ASS!!!"
Alex felt his erection brimming with fluids. They built hotly at his base, gurgling and brewing. Anne's asshole hugged him so tight that it almost held off his pleasure.
But it didn't forever, and when he gushed his hot gallons into her backside Anne kicked her dangling legs about and tried by clenching her rear to suck all the sticky wet stuff she could from him.
It heated her firm little bum, making it ripple appreciatively. She liked being fucked any way she could get it, and Alex was one way that was just great.
CHAPTER THREE
At eleven o'clock, Anne found herself on the way back home again. Alex, groaning over the mountain of work facing both of them, had decided-in line with his completely contradictory mood of the morning- to shut up shop and not do any work at all.
He would see about the postponement of that court case; then he meant to get in his car and go up to the mountains for a day or two of trout fishing. Anne could consider herself on vacation for the next three days. And if she was meeting Kenny for lunch, "Go home first," Alex had advised her shortly. "Do something about your looks. I don't know just what, but something. Another shade of lipstick, perhaps. Some costume jewelry if you own any, which you probably don't. A red dress, or a yellow one, or even dead white. Anything but that confounded oyster shade. Anything to liven yourself up a little. You should go in more for colors. Without question, you should wear a bright color when you're planning to jilt your young man."
"In other words," Anne had said, amused rather than offended, "as of this moment, I look like hell."
"Exactly, and instead you're actually a hell of a looker. Get some rest, kid."
When she got home her Aunt Molly Graham was on the porch, rocking placidly and looking at the morning paper. She had changed her place a few years ago, a house almost as big as the Veigh home, into a rooming house and put a housekeeper in charge. Needless to say she was a sharp old woman with plenty of time on her hands.
Aunt Molly was sympathetic with Anne's plight about Janet's return and her fears of losing Kenny. "Anne, if you let that sister of yours push you into the background when she comes back, I'll want to give you the spanking of your life. And if she starts any funny business with Kenny Wilcox... " Aunt Molly saw history repeating itself, and Anne knew what she was thinking. For all she knew Aunt Molly could have ended up her mother-she had loved Tom Veigh first. According to rumors he had deeply loved her too. Then Nellie, pretty as a picture and gay and sparkling after a year in Europe, stole him away. Three months later Tom married Nellie.
Aunt Molly didn't know what to say to the girl. She knew the situation, but had no real advice. If she could only make the dear girl understand the fact that the day would come when she would wish with all of her heart that she could know, once again, the pain of love. Because the pain and the heartbreak were all part of the richness and vitality of youth, and only the young could know it truly. She wished that she could cry to her: "Anne, darling, hang on to the pain-if pain you must feel-because even in that there is sweetness. Some day you will know it. Some day, when you are too old to feel much of anything, when your chief worries will be the high prices of eggs and the aches in your old bones when you get up in the morning."
It was no use. There was no way at all for age to reach across the chasm of experience and make the young understand the things which they, too, must learn through years of living. So Aunt Molly merely said, very gently: "You are a dear girl, Anne, and I love you with all my heart. Sometimes I wish you had been my own daughter, and no matter what happens, I hope it turns out for the best."
Upstairs, Anne showered quickly. Then, going to her closet to select a fresh frock, she remembered what Alex had said: "Wear a bright color," and it struck her, with a small shock, that she owned no bright-colored dresses. Everything seemed to be an off shade of some more decisive shade, even that oyster dress which Alex had disposed of so thoroughly this morning.
"Something not quite so conspicuous," she would say when she went to buy a dress. Was this because she believed that the pale, soft tones were more becoming to her? Or because she instinctively avoided anything daring? Avoided both colors and styles that might possibly attract attention to herself?
Scared little rabbit, she thought, for a moment thoroughly disgusted with herself, with her way of doing everything, with her complete inability to run to meet life gaily, laughingly, throwing a challenge to it as other girls did. As Janet had always done.
That's all you are. Just a scared little rabbit.
She selected a black and white checked gingham which had a tiny matching jacket. As she slipped the dress over her head, she caught a glimpse of herself in the long door mirror. White limbs, slender, delicately curved body, as pretty a figure, really, as a girl could ask for. A lovely, slender statue of a girl.
She walked over to the dressing table and regarded her face in the wide oval mirror which hung over it. Alex had said: "Julian Lowry's painting looked more like you than you look like yourself." Meaning what? And what had Julian, the artist, meant when he had said, "The plane structure of your face is excellent. Really excellent."
She touched the tips of her fingers to high squarish cheekbones, matched by a stubborn little chin with a cleft place in it. Her nose was small and straight, the mouth, with its sweet curve, wide. But when all was said and done, it was just another face, wasn't it? And certainly not one to set the world afire. What was it that she should do? More makeup? But she loathed heavy, garish makeup, and anyway, that sort of thing savored too strongly of those foolish columns of advice to the lovelorn. "Try another shade of lipstick, a touch of eye-shadow, a new hair-do, and first thing you know your skittish young man will be swooning at your feet!" Rubbish.
Talk was cheap. Artists had been known to prefer downright homely faces, professing to find an elusive beauty in them. And Alex often said things just to be different from other people. He was like that.
Glancing at her wrist watch, Anne realized with a start that she was due to meet Kenny in five minutes. His time was so valuable, she tried never to keep him waiting. She grabbed up her bag and a fresh handkerchief, ran down the stairs. Fortunately, Nellie drove up just as Anne got to the front porch. She could take the car back uptown.
Gordon's Grill, on the opposite corner to the town's largest bank, was right in the heart of the business section. Not a chance of finding a parking place in front of it, Anne knew. She drove the car up a side street and left it there. Then, walking the rest of the way, she had to pass Martha Rizik's dress shop, which reminded Anne that she was due there for a fitting this afternoon. That new evening dress, which she had been deliberately pushing to the back of her mind. The dress she planned to wear at her engagement party!
It all came down on her. Of course, she was still engaged to Kenny, and she should not cross bridges before she came to them.
But she couldn't handle it. She walked back to the office to wait for Alex. Once seated behind her desk, she remembered how it was.
Kenny and Janet had not been as discreet as they could've been. They were very open about their affair-perhaps the only person who didn't know for sure was their mother, Anne thought.
One time, Anne even caught them in bed.
Her mother was visiting her sister, Molly, and Janet had come home with Kenny. No one was in-Anne was supposed to go to a club meeting that afternoon.
But Anne returned to pick up the minutes of the last meeting, and on the way to her room she passed Janet's. Inside she heard her sister giggling, and then another low, hushed voice.
The door was open, but they didn't see her. Anne moved quickly back against the wall and peered into the room through the crack in the doorway.
What she saw filled her eyes and made her chest heave.
Janet already had her bra and blouse off, and was offering a cupped tit to Kenny, who gobbled at it eagerly. Her head was back and panting and her chest heaved in a way that bounced the mounds of flesh on her chest.
Kenny's hand was at the other nipple, pinching and squeezing the fat bud until it was red and swollen. Then he moved his face over to soothe it while his hand shifted to the other nip.
"OOOOOOOO KENNY!!!!" laughed Janet. "Suck my big bosoms, you fucker."
"MMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!" he moaned back in response. The hum job made her teat stand at attention in his humid mouth.
Anne watched as Kenny's hands opened her pants and one went down the front. Janet wiggled her butt trying to help him slip his hand around so he could finger her crotch. She rode on his hand, laughing and moaning away like a happy child.
Kenny was now sucking in her tit all the way, gobbling it in and out of his mouth wetly. When he let the pale skin drop out Janet could see the marks where his bites and sucking made the boob an inflamed red.
Then his hands grabbed at her pants and panties and slid them down. He put one hand through her crotch and one on her back and lifted Janet over to the bed.
Anne shifted position, trying to keep her eye on them while her wandering hand caused a reaction in herself.
Anne's hand grabbed at her puss through the light dress she was wearing, rubbing her clit with her thumb while she bunched up the material in between her slit and her hand and shoved it down into her wet center.
What especially turned her on was watching Kenny strip. He had a fantastic body- smooth and muscled, of which he revealed all but the best part in a flash. Then he stood before Janet with his bulge looking like it would rip open his shorts, taunting her.
"How badly do you want my prick?" he asked her.
"Real bad!!!" cried Janet.
"How bad?" he asked. "Will you suck me off until I come?"
"I'll suck your fat prick twice!!!" she spat back.
Kenny slowly fondled the elastic around his shorts. "Tell me how good I taste... " Janet licked her lips. "Ummmmmmm, your come is wonderful! It's all salty, and creamy, and sticky, and it just oozed down the back of my throat. Now be a bad boy and bring that fat cock over here to me."
Kenny still played, pulling his underwear down just far enough that a hint of his dick stuck out from the top.
"Stop that!!" she cried. "Come on over here and get sucked!!"
Kenny slipped off his shorts and Anne gasped when she gazed upon his tool. It was so long and fat, spongy with tight skin and sticking out straight from his body with erect purpose.
He walked over to the bed while Janet kneeled like a cat and put her head up. "Bring that thing to me," she moaned at him.
His cock was so hard that neither of them had to hold it up to her face. It just stuck straight at her mouth, which opened and let it glide in through the air without touching it.
The thing throbbed as it felt her hot breath encircle it. When her lips clamped shut around the tip Kenny felt his whole pecker heave and quiver.
Janet swirled her face around the fat dong, moving her body in an erotic crawling dance as she started to pump up and down along the slightly curving line of his shaft.
Her mouth was so wet and hot that it left a damp path where it moved, and Anne could see that Kenny's pecker was completely soaked with her saliva. She played with her buried quim harder, though it ached to be pierced and split open through the material. She breathlessly dreamed of Kenny's cock.
Kenny stood there being sucked until his whole body quivered. Then he asked Janet, "Why don't we put my cock into your sticky hole?"
Janet's laughter filled the room. "I never thought you'd ask," she said.
Janet reclined on the bed, her legs open, her knees cocked. Kenny stood up and looked down at her. "Your legs are beautiful," he said softly.
Janet ran a hand over her pink trench. "What about this?" she asked.
Kenny's grin was all the answer she needed. He climbed between her legs, guided his shaft in with one hand, and then began gently rocking between her hips.
Anne was watching, only aware that it should be her under Kenny, and not Janet.
Then Janet's legs linked around Kenny's back as she urged him on with her heels. He was going faster now, grinding down on Janet, and she seemed to love it.
Janet's arms came around his neck and pulled his lips down to hers. There was no sound except the squeal of the bed-springs and the deep breathing of Janet and Kenny.
He pulled it out almost all the way and then sank it in again, and Janet's moan of pleasure seemed to fill the entire house.
And then he withdrew completely and quickly knelt atop Janet, a knee on either side of her torso. He gripped his throbbing member and jerked it once or twice and his seed shot out over Janet's beautiful breasts.
Janet rubbed the stuff about, pushing it all over her spongy globes and rubbing it hard into the pink rippled flesh around her nipples. She grabbed up a gob and started spreading it along his meaty loins, rippling the skin with the sticky jizm.
"You really love my cock, don't you Janet?" he asked her.
"Oh yes!!!" cried the debauched girl, and she then brought her face to the big meat and began licking and sucking from the veined skin the juices she had applied there.
Kenny turned around and stuck his face in her snatch. Since he had fucked it, it was all wet and juicy, but still heaving without the release of his steaming hot bullets of love. He stuck his tongue down her tight slit and noticed that the tissue swarmed about it. He licked around her womb until the whole thing felt like it was contorting and spastically rippling.
Then his face went down to her tiny bung-hole, which he swizzled about with juices from his mouth and her quim. Soon the tiny puckered portal was wet and slimy. "Oh please... no!" cried Janet as he brought his pecker up to her rear.
"Oh yes, Janet, you love it!!" Then he jabbed it in and she screamed.
From her point in the hall Anne couldn't tell if her sister was pained or crazy with pleasure. But she did know that the juices were welling in her quim, burning hotter against her seeping inner flesh. She felt her whole body grow warm with the flush of erotic sensation.
Janet was kicking her legs and crying as Kenny slammed her rear. Her "ooooo's" and "aahhh's" were long and loud and tortured. But Anne knew she didn't want to be saved.
"AAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHH HHHHH" cried Janet in a low spurt as Kenny poured streams of fluid up her ass. Anne jerked herself rapidly once more, and then stole down the stairs and out the door.
That night she remembered the scene as she amused herself in bed. She wet her forefinger with her mouth and took it down to her dainty little rear. With her fingernail she played with the tight flesh until she dug her way in and twisted it about. She felt her ass burn.
Later she had a dream. She was in the same deserted field, this time walking naked up to the blanket by the stream.
Somebody was lying there, but she couldn't see who it was.
As she got closer the body turned up and looked at her. Anne felt a scared tingle.
It was Janet and she was nude. All over her tits was a hot and sticky patch of jizm. Janet ran her hands through the junk and licked her lips up at Anne.
"Hi there, little sister, wanna do some sucking?" Janet lifted a tit to her.
Anne felt her knees weaken and her face fall to her sister's cleavage. She started licking at the goo, first from the skin between and around Janet's tits, but then finally from the rock-hard nipples that felt so good against her tongue.
She felt some fingers grab at her pussy and pull her- up. She was surprised but excited to find her sister fingering her, Janet knew what a woman liked. She played with the wet slit, first tickling down the sheath and then rubbing her little clit until it broke open with spasms of mad love.
Her sister cupped her face and guided Anne to her wet pussy. The big, juicy folds still had drops of semen on them. Anne lovingly licked off the salty fluids. Then as Janet pushed hard against the cunt, she chewed her right up the middle.
Anne felt her own pussy get licked and nibbled until she was a quivering mass. Then she woke up feeling just the same.
CHAPTER FOUR
Kenny was late. Fidgety, nervous as a witch, Anne waited in the tiny entrance lobby leading to the dining room. She knew practically everyone in town, and nodded and smiled at several women coming in or going out. A Mrs. Edith Keeler, garrulous and gushing, stopped a moment to talk. "Anne, dear, how is your mother? Tell her I've been meaning to come over to see her, but I'm so busy, busy, busy. And what do you hear from that beautiful sister of yours? And that attractive young man of yours, such a dear boy, such a charming bedside manner, too. My dear, you'll have to watch him closely once you're married. It's such a strain, I should think, having an attractive doctor for a husband. Women have such a way of falling in love with their doctors. I've never understood why, but it just seems to happen-" With a coy smile, "When is the wedding to be, Anne? Haven't you set the date yet? Mustn't put it off too long, dear. He's so attractive and attractive men are at such a premium!"
Running down, from sheer exhaustion of breath, the woman seemed to expect some sort of an answer. Anne was tired of all that.
She moved on and left Anne alone, who paced until Kenny arrived. The whole town, she knew, would never forget that Janet jilted Kenny. She was sure they thought he was taking her because he couldn't get Janet. Yet she had to smile at his kind eyes as he walked in.
They sat down for dinner and talked about nothing in particular until the coffee came. Then he mentioned his letter from Janet.
That opened the whole can of worms. Anne quizzed him on his loyalty to her until he almost got angry. "It's been nearly five years since your sister threw me off and married another guy. It's been, roughly, five weeks since I asked you to marry me. You've grown into the girl I want to marry. It's hardly love on the rebound!"
"Skip it," she said quickly. But he had something else he wanted to tell her about. A surprise. "I think I've found just the apartment for us!" beamed Kenny. "If you agree, I'll give you something else to think about. But it'll call for some fast thinking.
Anne looked at him quizzically.
"How would you like to just run away and get married?" he asked.
Her heart thumped and her eyes grew wide. "You mean elope?"
He laughed. "If you prefer the word with the sentimental storybook touch, yes. That's what I mean. Elope. How about it?"
"But, Kenny, our engagement hasn't even been announced yet."
"Must it be?"
"No. I suppose not." She laughed, but her laughter had a wistful note. After all, she'd been looking forward to her engagement party. She'd been looking forward to all of the gay, happy, completely unimportant preliminaries to marriage. The exciting period during which a girl goes tiptoeing toward marriage to her love and the fulfillment of her every dream. The round of parties and dances and showers. Attention focused on herself who, for these few little weeks, for this one and only time in her life, holds the center of the stage. The "getting ready." The selection of the bridal gown. The loving envy of her friends. "Darling, aren't you simply frantic with excitement? I know I'd be. Think of having that sweet, darling Kenny Wilcox for a husband."
The last days of her girlhood.
The last days before she closes the pages of a fairytale, and picks up the more solemn book of life which waits for all women, has always waited-marriage.
Oh, it was make-believe, all of it. All of these last little plans and preparations. Not at all important. And why should she be reluctant to give them up? It would be just as beautiful to go off with Kenny and marry him, without any fuss and bother at all. And hadn't she always said that she didn't care a thing about big weddings? Hadn't she said time and time again that she'd just as soon put that extra money in something nice for her future home and just go off and be married quietly by a justice of the peace?
Of course she had said that.
Then why, why, when Kenny suggested doing that very thing, did she feel this sudden constriction of her heart? Why, without any warning at all, did she feel half sick with disappointment?
The answer was to be found in another question. Why, suddenly, was Kenny in such a hurry to get it all over with?
Why, out of a blue sky, did he suggest getting married immediately, before Janet came home?
The sky was as blue as ever, the sun shone as brightly, and it was as magnificent an early autumn day as could be imagined. But all of the wonder had gone out of the day for Anne.
She said, without much expression in her voice, "Well, it's something to think about, Kenny."
"Yes, I think so," Kenny said emphatically. "I'm very much in favor of it. Since we're going to be married, and now that I've found this apartment, I see no reason for waiting. It seems sort of silly."
"Yes. I see what you mean, Kenny."
They walked to where Kenny was parked and got into his car. They drove in silence, each one locked in private thoughts.
Why was he so eager to get married this way? Anne knew the answer. But it wasn't a very satisfying one.
Her mind drifted to days gone by. Kenny had seemed much more vivid and alive when he was dating Janet. Everyone knew it. and commented on it. Of course, Janet was the kind of girl who makes men feel that way, Anne thought.
There wasn't anything that Janet wouldn't do. One night Janet had come into Anne's room, her face flushed with excitement.
"Now don't be a blabbermouth and I'll tell you a secret," Janet had said.
Anne nodded. "I won't tell anyone," she answered. "What is it?"
Janet had sat on the edge of the bed. "I was with two guys at once!" she said in whisper.
At first Anne didn't know what Janet was talking about. Then she realized that Janet only talked about one thing: Sex.
"Two guys at once? How does that work out?" Anne had asked.
Janet laughed. "Pretty strange," she answered. "It can be awfully exciting, though!"
Anne was open-mouthed with the possibilities of it. "Tell me all about it," she said.
"Well, at first of course we didn't plan on anything like that. This old friend of Kenny's is visiting him for a week, and we all went out for the night.
"We had a few drinks and Kenny was feeling pretty frisky so we went to park by the lake. Kenny asked me if I minded Bill's coming along. Bill's a real handsome guy, so I said it was OK.
"But once we got started it really was out of control. I told Kenny I wanted to kiss Bill just so he wouldn't feel left out. That kiss really got it going. Before I knew it, I was kissing Bill and Kenny's hands were all over me.
"Then they changed positions and I was kissing Kenny while Bill fondled me. His hands went up and unsnapped my bra, and then he grabbed my tits and started rubbing them. Oh, it felt so good, I couldn't believe it!"
Janet then flew into a long-winded description of her adventure at the hands and cocks of the two strappy, well-stocked men.
Bill had crept his face up to her breasts and started licking them excitedly. His mouth nudged the nipples and drew them in, chewing them heartily.
At the same time Kenny had gotten up and thrown off his pants. Out popped his big, steely shaft. He straddled Janet and rammed it in her mouth.
The peckerhead shoved her tongue backwards, sliding between her lips and forcing Janet to cough and choke as it explored her mouth. Kenny was probing it around between her lips, swirling his hips so that the pecker almost spun against her cheeks.
Meanwhile Bill had licked down her stomach and was undoing her pants. He flung them off and attacked her heaving folds through her panties. He grabbed at the thin material with his teeth and ripped it open. Then he buried his mouth in her mushy lips, slurping them up into a chewy, fluttering mass.
By now Janet burned with racy tensions. She sucked at Kenny's cock-eagerly and with heaving lungs. She gulped at the skin, trying to flutter it in her mouth and persuade his juices to spit out and soak her.
Bill was licking hard at her quim, sliding the folds outward and dipping into the burning honey-pot to sample her juices. Down below in Janet everything swirled and heaved. She didn't know what to do with the two men above her. She decided to just lie back and enjoy it.
Her mouth hilted his dick and pulled hard, pumping at his base like that until a giant stream of jizm sprayed down her throat from the pulsing pecker. Then it sat there in her slithering mouth and oozed salty semen while she nuzzled it with her tongue and lips.
Her pussy now simmered with wet juices and erotic pulses, and she felt Bill's face rise from the crotch and his cock slide across her chest.
She felt one cock touch her lips as Kenny's hands grabbed the lips of her deep and sweaty hole and spread them open. Her mouth now wet and hot, she just slid Bill in and took him deeply with ease. His cock seemed to bulge even bigger as she wet its length.
Suddenly Kenny's generous hunk of meat was spilling into her center. It probed her like a giant pole, pushing aside flesh at the bottom and sides of her womb. Each thrust made her whole insides crackle. Soon from the way his hilt slammed against her aching clit he'd stimulated her into a series of wrenching orgasms.
Both men felt ecstatic but spasmodic quivers as Janet launched off into sexual bliss. Around Bill's cock her mouth swirled and tugged, gripping at it fully to suck out the juices.
Kenny's pecker was being rubbed and massaged by a quim that quivered like an earthquake. It gripped his tool and hugged it, swirling it within its fleshy, spongy wet grip.
Bill shot off first, and again as her mouth filled with fluid Janet felt herself choking. But she held her lips tight around the joint and sucked all the sticky stuff into her bulging mouth.
Bill's cock pulled out wet and sticky from her oral cavity. He looked at it and knew how to put the moistness to good work.
Janet was so far gone that all she could think about was the throbbing in her loins as Kenny hit her fast and hard in the slit. As he touched bottom her whole womb erupted, quivering and twisting around as his cock slid upward. What he would jam back into was a mushy mound of helplessly contorted flesh. It felt fantastic to both of them.
Suddenly a sharp pain emitted from her rear where Bill was lodging his moist prick into the tight spot between her fleshy cheeks.
"OH NOOOOH!" she cried. "You'll tear me open!!"
Bill jabbed and stuck the thing a few inches into her rear. She cried out as her ass curled up and tensed, but then it relaxed to hug the big meat tight and fast, where through her rear it throbbed out erotic sensations and suggestions.
He actually felt so good stuck up there that Janet rolled around, keeping Kenny inside her, so that Kenny was below thrusting direct and fast while Bill attacked her ass above.
Once he got there she wiggled her butt to get Bill moving. He shoved in again and she shoved back harder, helping him to part the tight passage. It gave way grudgingly.
When he pulled back out to get a better shot Janet felt her whole rear curl up and send out shock waves. Those compounded as Bill shoved back in just as Kenny snapped up into her womb full blast.
Suddenly Kenny was throbbing out pellets into her pussy that shuddered her body. Hot little gobs pounded her innards, making her whole body thunder with pleasure.
Janet grabbed at her tits and started pinching them, riding the two men hard and fast, thrusting her rear to bring Bill into her deep and securely.
She cried out in happiness, "OOOOOO OOOHHHHHHHHH!!!! FUCK ME YOU TWO!!!!!!!"
Then Bill was slipping in and out of her rear with a pounding fury, dropping bombs of pearly juice that sizzled in her rear.
By the time Janet finished her story, Anne's cunt was very wet.
CHAPTER FIVE
The street to which Kenny drove was, like Anne's own home, in one of the older sections but on the opposite side of town. Here, too, there were a number of large, old-fashioned homes with wide, sweeping lawns in front of them, gardens to the side and back. A double line of towering old maple trees, their leaves already beginning to turn, formed a kind of archway. It was a lovely street. Very lovely.
Kenny drew up and stopped before one of the largest houses, colonial style, with white columns supporting a two story high roof over the wide porch. In its day, this had been the home of one of the town's wealthiest families, among its original founders. But that was now ancient history. The sons and daughters had married and left town. The house, after changing hands several times, had now been remodeled and turned into small apartments. Only the outside retained even a semblance of its former appearance. Inside everything was very modern and up to date.
In Hillview, far more than in many other southern towns, there were charming old buildings that were now apartments, all new and modern inside.
They went inside and looked around. Anne was particularly quiet. Kenny was not.
He made her admire the picture window in the living room, facing down over the garden which, in the spring, would be gay and fragrant with roses. Two bedrooms, one of them very small, or course, but still large enough to hold his medical books and journals and be fitted up as a kind of study.
The kitchen was shining white. It was neither too large nor too small, and it was completely modern, even up to a garbage disposal, something Anne had read about but never actually seen before.
Every room got plenty of sun. But the truth of the matter was that Anne was worried. She still wasn't sure if Kenny loved her for herself, or some image and memory he had of her not-so-dear sister.
The way she saw it, he was afraid. That's why he was so anxious to marry her.
"Look, Kenny," she said. "Let's be honest. You were wildly in love with my sister and she slammed you by marrying somebody else. Since then you managed to bury your feelings so deep that you believed they were dead. But when you learned she was coming home, and maybe without a husband, the protective covering slit right down the middle. You started remembering a thousand things you thought were forgotten forever, and right this minute you don't actually know for sure whether you're still in love with Janet or not. Isn't that the truth of it, Kenny? Isn't it?"
When he still didn't answer, she said a little angrily: "I don't want to be treated like a child, Kenny. I'm not a frail little blossom that's going to wilt on the vine if I have to give you up. I won't enjoy it but I can take it. What I can't and won't take is to be lied to because you feel sorry for me. And I won't be married out of pity, either," she cried with considerable spirit. "That's the worst insult you could possibly offer me. To try to rush me into an immediate marriage because you were afraid if you waited a few weeks you just couldn't go through with it! Now I want the truth, Kenny."
She caught his arms and gave them a vigorous shake. "Do you understand, Kenny Wilcox? I want the truth."
He spoke then, very quietly. "Will you believe me, Anne, if I tell you that I don't know what the truth is? I just don't know."
Kenny brushed one hand over his eyes in a weary gesture, then walked over to the window and stood staring down into the garden where the roses that had bloomed so gorgeously a few weeks ago were already dying. He spoke very low. "I thought that I was completely over it, a long time ago. I haven't given Janet more than a passing thought in weeks, months. I'd have sworn that she no longer meant a thing to me. But when her letter came this morning-" Again he passed his hand over his eyes, and it might have been the gesture of a man who could not see very clearly. He shook his head slowly. "I can't tell you what the truth is, Anne, because I just don't know. I feel unsure about everything. I thought if we got married immediately, it would be something firm and certain to hold to, and that then my doubts would go away."
He turned to her, and his gray eyes were dark and shining with a deep and abiding tenderness. He took her gently into his arms. "This much I can tell you for sure, Anne. You are sweet and fine and true, and everything that I want in a wife. Everything. You are good. I know that there isn't a mean or a disloyal streak in you. I would trust my life, my future with you. I would trust my hopes and my plans with you and know that you would never fail me. I know that when you marry, it will be for worse as well as for better, and that if the going got tough, you'd be right in there pitching beside me. I know that you're the kind of a girl who would stick, always. And I have wanted you for my girl. With all of my heart I have wanted that, sweetheart. I still do."
His tone harshened, and his arms tightened convulsively around her as he repeated, "I still want you for my girl! And yet-" He let her go, and one hand fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette. "Having said all that, you'll probably call me a liar when I tell you, honestly, that I still don't know what I feel about Janet. Or will feel."
He turned back to the window, his softly murmured words might have been spoken to himself. "It was a kind of madness, what I felt for her, and I do not know if the madness is over." He shook his head slowly. "I just don't know."
It was easier to do than Anne would have thought possible. And perhaps that was because all she could feel for the moment was a kind of helpless numbness. The capacity to feel pain or hurt or even shock seemed to have gone out of her.
She walked across the room and got her bag from the radiator where she had left it when they came in. She opened it and took out the ring with the small diamond in it. She had been waiting to wear it in public until their engagement had been formally announced. She walked back to Kenny, who was still standing staring dismally out of the window.
When Anne put the ring in his hand, he stared at it for a moment, shifting it about in his palm. Then, with a short laugh: "Well, it wasn't much of a ring anyway, was it?" And he slipped it carelessly into his pocket.
Anne stood close beside him, yet was careful not to touch him as she said slowly, her voice under perfect control: "Let's not be dramatic about it, Kenny. Let's just say we both want a little more time to make up our minds. And I hope we can go right on being the same good friends we've always been."
"Oh, skip it," Kenny said savagely. "For Pete's sake, skip all the corny lines about remaining good friends and all the rest of it. That I can't take."
"You can't take it." Anne stared at him with quietly angry eyes. "I thought I was the one who was having to take plenty."
"That's just it. No matter how you pretty it up with sensible talk, you're the one who's taking the dirty end of the stick, and it makes me feel like a first-class heel."
CHAPTER SIX
When Anne went home late that afternoon, her mother was fluttering and darting about like an excited butterfly. Another letter had come, special delivery from Janet. In the first letter she had been vague about the date of her return. Possibly ten days, she had written. Now, a few hours later, she was coming in three days.
Anne thought, knowing Janet, she'll be here when she gets here. And that would be when she thought she had stirred up sufficient excitement and suspense about her arrival.
Once Uncle Ned had said, laughing: "Our Janet is the type who isn't satisfied unless she's the bride at the wedding and the corpse at the funeral." And it was true. Never, even when she was a child, had Janet been happy unless all attention was focused upon herself. Her entrances into rooms had to be made with a dramatic flourish, her easily wept tears more bitter and racking than any average tears. She had all of the qualifications for a star of the silver screen, except any real ability to act. Now, Anne knew, her homecoming would have to be done with gestures.
Anne sighed to herself. It was wearying even to think about. Still more wearying to hear her mother saying worriedly: "There's so much to be done before she gets here. We must get all the silver polished and Janet's old room must be opened up and aired and cleaned. I'd like to put up new drapes and curtains, but there just isn't time. So we'll just have to take down the old ones and wash and iron them, and what about that new chair you bought for your bedroom, Anne? Don't you think it would be nice to put it in Janet's room?"
"No, I don't think so," Anne said, and was a little ashamed of her curt tone. But she had bought that chair with her own money, for the express purpose of having a comfortable place to sit and read late at night. As she often did. And why should she be expected to hand it over to Janet, who had probably never read a book through in her whole life, and who used a bedroom for nothing except to sleep in and to dress and preen herself and admire herself before the mirrors?
"Don't you think you're being a little selfish?" Nellie asked, gently reproachful.
Anne smiled. Selfish. It was a word she was accustomed to, where Janet was concerned. In the old days, her mother had invariably accused her of selfishness if she protested against giving in to Janet's slightest whim.
Nellie wasn't to be blamed. If anything, she was to be pitied. It was that complete blind spot she had where Janet was concerned. Oddly, Anne had never felt any deep hurt because Janet was their mother's favorite. But she had always resented being expected to give up the best of everything to her sister. Now that she was older, earning her own money, she was prepared to stand up for her own rights, so far as the little things were concerned.
She would not give up her pretty, chintz-covered easy chair. Nor the hooked rug, lovely with its soft pastel shades, beside her bed.
I may have to give up Kenny to her, Anne thought drearily. I may have to hand her over my love, the only thing in life that really matters! But I won't give her my chair or my rug. I won't let her have the things that don't matter in the least.
"I've given Kenny back his ring," Anne announced, over dinner that evening. Might as well get it said and over with. Her mother would have to know before long, anyway. So say the words. Get used to the horrible, ugly sound of them.
Get used to that iron band constricting her heart.
Get used to the feel of not having him any more. Get used to the emptiness, the loneliness, the intolerable pointlessness of everything that she did. The steps that she took, the words that she spoke. Embrace the pain! Get used to it, once and for all, because she was going to have to live with it for a long, long time. Perhaps forever. Or so it seemed to her now.
Nellie was busy with a carving knife, cutting slices off of a leg of lamb, when Anne broke the news. "Really?" she said, pausing for no more than a second or two, then going right on with the business of carving. "Some peas, Anne? These are lovely and fresh. And I want to know how you like that pear salad. It's a new recipe. I thought I'd try it and see how we like it; then we can have it when Janet comes. She's so fond of dainty, unusual dishes."
Anne could have screamed.
She wanted to cry: "Doesn't it make any difference to you that I'm unhappy? Is a pear salad for Janet more important to you than my breaking heart?" Almost immediately her sense of humor got the best of her. After all, hearts didn't actually break. Certainly not hers. And she would have been the first to resent any show of maudlin pity. So perhaps Nellie was taking it in the very best way.
Presently her mother came back to the subject. "Well, I think you've done a very sensible thing, Anne. I suppose it was because of Janet and I hardly see how you could have done otherwise. I know that Kenny is very fond of you and he would be a good husband. But I've never believed a girl can find much happiness with, a man who's hopelessly in love with another woman. And Kenny was so absolutely wild about Janet. I've never believed that he really got over it. I've never thought that he loved you in the same way that he did her."
It was the smug complacency of Nellie's tone that Anne resented. And, still more resentful, she heard her saying brightly: "Of course, I haven't any idea whether or not Janet would want Kenny back again. Likely as not, she wouldn't even look at him. Still, I can understand how the dear boy feels. Naturally, he's hopeful. And if Janet were to show any interest in him, I wouldn't have a word to say against it. She could certainly do worse. Did do worse, when she took up with Bob Thompson."
Anne stared at her mother briefly. Then, knowing her nerves were near the breaking point, she pushed back her chair. "I'm young and healthy, and supposed to have lots of good rich blood. Would you like me to have myself bled, so I can turn several quarts of that over to Janet, too, Mother?"
Nellie, looking perfectly solemn, was slow in grasping the sarcasm. When she did, she looked hurt. "Now, Anne, you mustn't take things I say in that spirit. You must remember that Janet has had a very hard time of it. Her marriage has gone wrong. When she comes home, she will have to make a complete new adjustment to life. If I seem overly anxious about her-"
"Well, my engagement has gone wrong and I may have to make a few new adjustments myself."
"Oh, Anne, for heaven's sake. Come back here and sit down and finish your dinner. I have some nice tapioca pudding for dessert. Anne, dear, please. I'll be very much hurt if you persist in acting this way."
But Anne was already on her way out of the room. "I'm sorry, Mother. I'm not hungry. I really couldn't eat another bite."
Nor could she hang around this house for the rest of the long, lonely, empty evening. The first, she supposed, of endless more lonely, empty evenings-an eternity of such evenings-when Kenny would not be coming, or phoning to arrange to meet her at the corner in front of the Hillview Hotel or to say that he was being held up by an emergency call and would be delayed for half an hour or so.
He won't be coming any more. Kenny won't be coming any more-it's all over, all over, all over. The words, pitiless, holding her doom from which there was no escape, were like drops of burning acid spilling slowly over her heart. For by now the pain and the awareness of what it all meant had started in for fair.
She was going down the first of those long, steep, difficult steps into the complete consciousness that her love was lost forever. She had never known before what the pain and hurt of love could really mean. But now she knew. Or was beginning to find out.
Anne went upstairs, bathed her face and changed her dress, then, coming downstairs again, called back to her mother in the kitchen to say that she was going out for a walk. She might go to the movies. When Nellie called back, "If you wait a few minutes, Anne, I'll run upstairs and dress and we could go to the movies together," Anne knew that it was her mother's way of trying to make amends.
Well, that was okay. Anne wasn't holding any grudge, not indulging in self-pity. But her every need, right now, was to get off by herself. She called back, perfectly friendly: "If you don't mind, Mother, I think I'd rather go alone."
Yet when she got outside and was on her way uptown, her loneliness seemed almost more than she could bear.
She thought, reverting to an infantile longing for love and to be made to feel secure, If only I had someone I could go to and talk to and bawl my eyes out.
But she had no one like that, and for the very first time in her life she thought of how she had always contrived to shut other people a little away from her.
She had any number of girlfriends in town, and very good friends they were, up to a point. But she had never been one for close . intimacies, for confiding every secret of her heart in anyone at all. It was as if she had never altogether trusted anyone. When she had become engaged to Kenny, there had been no girlfriend with whom she had closeted herself and gushed and enthused about the wonders and joys of loving and of being loved by the right man. So now there was no one to whom she could go, whom she could ask to share her grief with her.
Nor did she really want that.
What, then, did she want?
She didn't quite know. Only not this terrible feeling of aloneness. Not this feeling that nowhere, not anywhere in the town, or even in the whole wide world, was there anyone who really gave a hoot whether she was unhappy or not. Kenny, no doubt, was already dreaming his bright, hopeful dreams about Janet. Her mother wanted to be kind and was sorry when she was unkind, yet was so completely absorbed in the thoughts of Janet's homecoming that nothing else mattered a great deal.
And she, Anne, was walking down the street alone. Shut in with her own unhappiness. Too reserved by nature to seek easy companionship with anyone she might happen to run into. And not really wanting that, anyway. Shrinking, instinctively, from the very thought of talking small talk to comparative strangers on this night when the very flesh of her body seemed raw and quivering from the disappointment of seeing her dreams die before her.
She stopped in front of the movie theatre and studied the billboards. It was one of those foolish, farcical comedies, not the sort of thing she ever enjoyed. Tonight she questioned if she could sit through it.
She went on down the street. When she came to Parke's Drug Store, she decided to go in for a soda. It would be something to do, help pass the time. She had found a seat and given her order before she noticed Alex Brooks at the far end of the counter.
He had just finished a coke and was lighting a cigarette.
Seeing her, he smiled, got up and came around to the vacant chair beside her. "I thought you were going fishing," Anne said immediately.
"So did I," said Alex. "Then I thought I wouldn't go. It was as simple as that." He made a face as the boy set Anne's strawberry soda down in front of her. "How can you drink that revolting mess, anyway?"
Anne laughed. "Oh, it's quite simple. I simply draw on the straw and down it goes."
Alex sighed. "Well, if you didn't have any faults at all, I suppose you wouldn't be human. And if you weren't human, I wouldn't love you. But I'm warning you, woman, when you and I are married, we'll eat together, work together, have fun together, but you'll drink your strawberry sodas alone. There I draw the line."
Anne laughed. "Alex, you fool. You can talk more nonsense."
"Sure I can. Quite a card, this Alex Brooks. The life of every party, the boy in every teen-aged girl's dream of romance. Still we are going to get married, aren't we? Or are we not? I've been restless as a cat all afternoon wondering whether or not I was an engaged guy. Am I, honey? Hmmmm? Am I?"
It was his way, she knew, of asking what had happened with Kenny without putting the question in so many words. She thought, Thank heavens for Alex. For here was one person, after all, to whom she could talk without reservations. She told him, briefly, just what had happened. And when she had finished, he was sensitive enough, understanding enough, not to torment her with maudlin pity, not to prod deeper at the wound with unnecessary questions.
He simply asked her, smiling a little: "So you decided not to use the alibi I offered you."
She shook her head. "Of course I didn't, Alex. You know me better than that, don't you? Do you seriously think I'm the kind who would fall back on a phony engagement just to save my pride?"
He said, not smiling at all now: "You're the one who keeps calling it a phony. I never said that."
"Oh, well, that's what you meant."
"Did I?" He looked around at her, studied her for a moment, then with a slow, quizzical smile he reached in his pocket for a letter and changed the subject.
"Know who Barney Fosdick is?" he asked her.
"Should I know?" The name seemed vaguely familiar, yet Anne couldn't place it immediately until Alex elaborated: "Barney Fosdick is one of the best portrait painters this country ever turned out. He did several things that got him international recognition. His paintings have brought as much as five thousand bucks. He's getting along in years now. He's well past his prime, and not a well man. Here's a letter I just got from him." And Alex took three or four sheets, written in longhand, from the envelope.
Anne remembered the name now. She asked, surprised: "What in the world is he writing to you about? I've never heard you mention him. Is he an old friend, Alex?"
"Nope." Alex shook his head. "I haven't had the pleasure of meeting the old guy as yet, but I hope to. He's vacationing near here. Doctors sent him south for his health. He's coming over to Hillview one day soon. That's what this letter is about, mostly." Alex was looking over the pages thoughtfully, rereading bits here and there.
"What's bringing him to Hillview?" Anne asked, only faintly curious.
"You," Alex said.
At first Anne didn't grasp what he had said, and when she did, she laughed. She assumed that Alex was kidding her. "Well, now, that's no surprise," she said, her smile droll. "Things like that happen everyday in my life. World renowned artists running about, hunting me up. It's my fatal beauty that attracts them, needless to say. Seriously, Alex, what is the man coming here for."
"Just the reason I told you, dear. He wants to see you."
"Oh, Alex, be sensible. You know perfectly well that you're kidding."
He was not kidding. "He saw that picture you modeled for, 'Girl In A Yellow Scarf,' at the New York exhibit. He took a fancy to it, same as I did. He also wanted to buy it, only I got my offer in first. Now he wants to make a deal with me. That's partly what this letter is about. The old fellow says he hasn't long to live-bad heart condition. Don't ask me why he's taken such a fancy to the picture; I only know what he's written here and he didn't go into reasons. Maybe it reminds him of his first sweetheart or something. Anyway, he very much wants to have it to live with for as long as he does live. He wants me to let him have it, with the understanding that it's to be turned back to me when he dies. That's what he's coming over to Hillview to talk with me about."
Alex turned to the last page, studying it for a moment before he read, quoting: "If it can possibly be arranged, I should deem it a great privilege to become personally acquainted with the young lady who modeled for this exceptionally fine piece."
Alex folded the letter. "Expresses himself like a gentleman of the old school, doesn't he? Well, what about it, Anne? Have I your permission to bring the old bird around when he gets here?"
"Why, certainly. It would be wonderful to meet anyone so famous and a real artist. Only I just can't think why he should want to meet me."
"Good," said Alex. "Then that's all settled." Then,, with another of his abrupt changes of subject: "I'm going fishing tomorrow, Anne. No fooling, this time. Just for the day. How would you like to go along?"
A little surprised at the invitation, Anne laughed. "But I don't know how to fish."
"Who cares? I'll teach you, if you'd like to learn. If not, we'll just sit by a mountain stream and watch the pretty little fish swim by. We'll consider the relative value of fish in the general scheme of things, as compared with man. Personally, my vote is for the fish. We'll forget our troubles. With your permission, I'll take along a book of poetry and read to you, just to give a romantic touch to our little outing. You didn't know that I was a poetry lover? Ah, Anne, the things you don't know about me! What do you say-will you come with me, Anne?"
She remembered his kisses and all of the rest. "Of course I'll come, Alex. And love it."
But her mind was on another picnic, one that Anne shared with Kenny. It seemed like another life, so far removed was it for her.
Kenny had selected a beautiful spot by the lake. There was no one around, and after a wonderful lunch of sandwiches and chilled white wine, they had lain on the blanket, looking at the clear blue sky.
Then Kenny leaned over and said, "There's only one thing missing from this scene."
"What's that?"
"A beautiful, naked girl."
She laughed. "Will I do?"
Kenny grinned. "You're exactly who I had in mind!"
Anne stood up and slowly began to remove her clothing. Kenny's face reflected his excitement, as did the bulge in his trousers.
Finally, Anne stood before him, naked and beautiful as he had desired. "Damn," he said. "You've got the best figure I've ever seen!" Anne was slender, but her breasts were full, pink-tipped beauties, and Kenny's eyes were directly on them.
He reached out for her and Anne skipped out of reach. "Not a chance," she said, "until I see the goods!" Kenny grinned and stood up. "If you insist," he said. Moments later he too was naked, and his powerful body was tensed with sexual excitement.
Anne stood in front of him and handled his throbbing tool. "So big," she said, remembering scenes she had seen with Kenny and Janet. But now that big powerful sex machine was hers, and she was glad.
Just thinking about it got her hot. She quickly reclined on the blanket, opened her legs, and reached for him. He quickly mounted her but first he straddled her chest, his enormous penis jutting between her breasts.
She lifted her head and sucked the crimson tip of it, loving the soft velvety feel of his member. Then, as he reached behind and fingered her juicy bush, she knew that the time was right.
Without a word he slid down and impaled her with one sudden move. She stiffened as she felt herself stretched wide to take him, and then the regular rhythm of his strokes filled her with hot pleasure.
It was over quickly-neither Kenny nor Anne had much stamina. Neither had enough experience to prolong the delicious feelings. But it was good for both of them, always.
CHAPTER SEVEN
After half a dozen more telegrams, and as many last minute changes of plan, Janet finally arrived the following Monday morning. At the station Aunt Molly and Uncle Ned were already waiting when Anne and her mother drove up in their old sedan, vintage' 1968. Uncle Ned, stout, cheerful, and secretly thankful for a heart condition which gave him an excuse to avoid all physical exertion, even walking, conceded with a chuckle that not for anything would he have missed the show of Janet's arrival. A few casual friends had collected on the wooden platform outside the small red brick station building. The news of Janet's return had already spread all over town. Nellie had given out the story that Janet, suffering from a "nervous condition," was under doctor's orders to come home for a "long rest."
The train, as was expected, was seven or eight minutes late. It always was. It was a junction train, carrying only day coaches, which connected with the express from Chicago and stopped at every way station.
It came, finally.
Two or three passengers got off. Then after a brief pause, during which everything and everyone-the puffing engine, the trainman, the porter, the waiting relatives, and especially Nellie-seemed to be waiting in a state of suspended animation, Janet appeared, smiling and waving, on the train platform. She was descending the train steps, flanked to the front and rear by two young men wearing the uniforms of marine officers.
Janet was fairly tall and dark, with a rich, exotic type of beauty. Her smile was as dazzling and seemed as practiced, which it was, as that of a screen star. And her every movement as graceful. She was wearing a gray suit which had an outrageously expensive look. She was wearing a red hat, red accessories, and over one arm she carried a leopard-skin coat.
"Mother, darling!" Janet threw herself into her mother's arms, and when she withdrew there were tears in her eyes. She had always cried easily and beautifully.
There were even a few tears left for her greeting of Anne. "Oh, darling, it's so wonderful to see you, so wonderful to see all of you." And her outstretched arms seemed to embrace everyone. "And so heavenly to be home again. I can't tell you."
Then she remembered the boyfriends, waiting in the background. Catching an arm of each, she presented them to her mother, to Anne. Captain Ed Stoneleigh, Lieutenant Walter Connor. They were to be stationed at Fort Prendle. To the captain, with an arch smile and still clinging to his arm: "During the last war, the boys out at Fort Prendle said I rated a medal or something for my work as a morale builder."
The captain smiled, said as was expected of him: "If you ask me, this is the same old war, and I feel my morale slipping badly. Can I count on you to take care of it for me?"
"Now there," Janet retorted gaily, "is the answer to something that's been bothering me. My real reason for coming back to Hillview. All because there had to be someone to take care of your poor little morale. Captain, would you care to bring alone your morale and have dinner with us this evening? And you, too, Lieutenant Connor. In other words," another gay laugh, "I know mother will adore feeding my old pals, Ed and Walt, and so will I. And if you should bring along an itch to go dancing later, it won't make me mad."
Once they were in the car, with Anne driving, Nellie was faintly reproachful. "I don't mean to be critical, dear. But I rather wish you hadn't been quite so free and easy with those young officers. You know how quick people are to talk. You're supposed to be still a married woman. I haven't let anyone know that you're divorcing Bob. But if you start right in-"
"Well, I'm not divorcing Bob," Janet stated unexpectedly.
"You're not? Why, I thought you wrote-"
"I know," Janet said. "I did write that I'd made up my mind to get a divorce. Bob had been getting on my nerves. I really didn't see how I could stand any more of it. But we talked things over. Bob begged and pleaded with me not to do anything too hastily. So finally I promised him that I wouldn't."
She laughed. "Bob says that what I need is a vacation from marriage. He thinks I got married too soon, before I was really ready to settle down to being married. He said once that I should have gone on playing with dolls another year or two, and he could be right, at that. Anyway, he told me to come on home and just forget that I had a husband. He told me to go dancing, have fun, find some new boyfriends, or go back to the old ones if I wanted to. I'm to feel as free as a bird, and simply forget that he exists.
"Of course," Janet added as a careless afterthought. "Bob is to feel free to have other girlfriends if he likes. Only," that throaty, amused laugh again, "I don't have any worries on that score. Bob never looks at another girl. He just isn't the type."
Nellie looked worried. All this struck her as a very curious attitude for a young husband to take. She had been all in favor of a legal separation, if that was what Janet wanted. But, "Are you very sure that Bob isn't interested in someone else, dear?"
Janet shook her head emphatically. "Not a chance. The lad is crazier about me than he ever was. He was willing to do anything, agree to anything, to keep me from getting a divorce. I've been so terribly bored lately. Bob works so hard, sometimes he has to work nights, and I'm left alone so much. I get so restless I simply can't stand it. Messing around a little apartment all the time simply drives me mad. And Bob doesn't like me to go out on the street alone after dark. He says it worries him so he can't get any work done."
Nellie said, surprised: "But all this sounds so different from what you wrote in your letter, Janet. You said that Bob had been cruel and unkind."
"Did I?" said Janet, the lift of her beautifully arched dark brows suggesting that she hadn't the faintest recollection of ever having written such a thing. "Oh, well, it was probably the mood I was in. No, I can't honestly say that Bob was ever what you'd call cruel to me, unless you want to call it cruelty to leave me sitting around by myself, getting so bored I could scream."
"Are you still in love with Bob?" Nellie asked.
Janet, faintly amused at the question, gave a pretty shrug. "I wouldn't know, Mother. I really wouldn't. I don't go all trembly when I hear his feet pattering along the hall, if that's what you mean. I'm still rather fond of the character. But am I fond enough of him to go on spending the rest of my life with him? That's the sixty-four thousand dollar question. Personally, I doubt it. But I promised him to give the thing a chance. So that's the setup. I'm vacationing from marriage. If I get bored with my vacation, I'll go back to Chicago and Bob. If something better turns up, I'll go to Reno."
Her voice turned surprisingly sharp. "Meanwhile, I mean to do exactly what I said, Mother. I mean to have a good time. If I want to invite men to the house and go out with them, I mean to do it. And I'm just not interested in what the meddling Matties around this hick town may think about it. So that's the way it's going to be, Mother. And if you don't approve-" Her curt tone made the words a kind of subtle threat. Nellie, always ready to give in where Janet was concerned, said quickly: "Now Janet, pet, you know that I want you to do whatever you think best, whatever will make for your ultimate happiness. I promise you that I shan't try to interfere. I just didn't understand at first. Your letters had given me a rather different impression of what the situation was. But now that you've explained everything-" To Anne's way of thinking, Janet had explained nothing, except that she was as self-centered as ever, that she was concerned more with amusing herself than with her responsibility toward Bob who was working hard to get ahead, that now she had run away from her home and her marriage, as a child would play hooky from school, to discover if there wasn't something more interesting to be found on the outside.
She was taking advantage of Bob's deep and thoroughly unselfish love for her. No man, Anne knew, could enjoy the idea of having his wife go home to stay indefinitely, to amuse herself, go dancing, go on other dates with as many new or old boyfriends as happened to strike her fancy. Yet Bob, because of his love for Janet, was ready to stand for it. And Janet, completely irresponsible, hadn't a qualm about taking advantage of that unselfish love.
Anne felt sick at heart, sick in spirit. It was because of this completely selfish and undeniably lovely creature that she, Anne, had had to relinquish her own love. No doubt Kenny would find himself head over heels in love with Janet again the minute he saw her. For she was more beautiful than ever.
Intent on her driving, Anne had taken no part in the conversation. They were in sight of the house when Janet turned to her, laughing. "Well, Anne darling, I see you're the same quiet little mouse as always. Still waters run deep, so I'm told. It's positively frightening to think what a deep one you must be."
Anne smiled. "I'm not too good a driver. I just can't talk and watch out for traffic at the same time."
"What a safe and sane little darling you are." Janet's pretty laughter had a gurgling sound. "I'll bet you wouldn't dream of trying to play married and single both at the same time, the way I'm doing."
"No. I probably wouldn't."
"Good. That's my play-it-safe, solemn-eyed little sister. What a lot of trouble you'll save yourself, being the way you are. But of course you'll miss a lot of fun, too. By the way, darling, how's the big romance coming along? I might as well confess that Fm jealous. Imagine you getting yourself engaged to Kenny Wilcox. It seems only yesterday that the lad was the favorite dream boy in my life. When I see Kenny, I must give him a good scolding for his faithlessness to me."
Anne's smile was cool, her voice under perfect control. "Fm afraid you won't have anything to scold him about, Janet. Kenny and I aren't engaged." Janet's beautiful dark eyes widened, for the first time showing an interest that was more than perfunctory. "You aren't? But, Anne, you wrote me a few weeks ago that-"
"That was a few weeks ago."
"Oh. I see. You mean you've broken off with him since you wrote?"
"Yes." Anne nodded. Then, attempting a rather poor joke, she laughed: "It seems to be Kenny's fate to be jilted by the Veigh girls. Lucky for him there aren't any more of us."
Janet's eyes had taken on an extremely thoughtful expression. She smiled, but not very much, over Anne's facetious comment. "So you and Kenny aren't engaged, after all," she repeated, as if it were a definitely interesting item of news. "Who broke it off?" she asked suddenly. "You? Or Kenny?"
Thoroughly provoked at Janet for keeping on the subject, Anne was tempted to tell her it was none of her business. Then, changing her mind, she decided to let Janet have the truth straight between the eyes. "I broke it off," Anne said, "when I learned that you were coming home. There seems to be some doubt as to whether Kenny still nurses a hopeless passion for you, or whether he doesn't. I decided to turn him loose so he could find out."
You could tell by the sparkle in her eyes and the quick lift in her voice that Janet was thrilled and delighted to hear all this. "You mean to tell me that Kenny is still in love with me? Why, the poor darling."
"I didn't tell you anything of the sort," Anne said crisply. "I told you that he didn't know and neither do I."
"Doesn't it amount to the same thing?" Janet asked sweetly.
It would not, Anne realized, be a loving, sisterly gesture to turn around and slap Janet in the face. There were the amenities to be observed, so Anne tried to observe them.
Anne said sweetly: "I have Kenny's phone number written down on a card for you. He is usually in his office until four o'clock, and he's very good at giving shots to people who are in a highly nervous condition. You did say that your nerves were shot, didn't you, sis? So if I were you, right after we have lunch, I'd phone Kenny and make an appointment. I'd go over to his office and have him give me a shot. Then you can ask him if he's still hopelessly in love with you. I really believe that's the best way of finding out. Now, if you don't mind, shall we stop discussing it?"
"Now, Anne," her mother put in, "you mustn't be so touchy. Janet is only trying to show a sisterly interest in your affairs."
"Of course I am," Janet echoed swiftly. "I've been away so long, and I love you all so much, and it's so very wonderful to be home with my own mother and sister again. I was just truly and sincerely interested in how your love affair was going. I didn't mean to pry, Anne. Heavens! I hope you don't think I'm still carrying a torch for Kenny. I was just trying to be sisterly."
Oh, sure, Anne thought, gritting her teeth. Sisterly Janet. Where Kenny was concerned, or any other attractive man for that matter, she was about as sisterly as a nice, hungry rattlesnake slowly uncoiling before it struck for blood.
Anne stopped herself. I'm just jealous, she said to herself. But she knew she wasn't totally wrong. She knew that sooner or later, Janet would be on the phone to Kenny.
But Anne was wrong. Janet didn't bother phoning. She simply went straight to Kenny's office, that very afternoon.
Kenny had sent his receptionist home early. When Janet arrived, he was alone in the office. She walked right in as if she owned the place. She perched on a corner of his desk and smiled at him. "Kenny," she said. "You've got every girl in town in a tizzy. I guess the best thing I ever did was break up with you. It certainly made you the man to marry!"
He grinned at her self-consciously. "Look," he said. "I just wanted to set the record straight. I'm in love with Anne and that's it. I wanted to see you alone first to get it right between us. What we had going was a long time ago. There's nothing left of that. Believe me. Looking at you, I can tell you that's the truth. I wasn't sure until right now, but now I am."
"Really?" Janet was enraged, but she wasn't going to show it. She stood up and calmly took off all of her clothing. She could see the furious reddening of Kenny's face. "Please, Janet," he said. "Don't."
"Don't what?" she asked, coming close to him, pressing her body against him.
She felt the answering hardness and she smiled. It was so easy for her, she thought. Men were such jerks. She reached down and cupped his hardness and almost laughed in his face when he moaned.
"How do you want me, honey? You want me to bend over and take it that way or do you want me flat on my back, ready and willing?"
Ken groaned once more and then quickly unzipped his trousers and hauled it out. "Suck it," he said, and Janet fell to her knees and quickly inserted his throbbing penis into her warm wet mouth.
"You're such a whore," he said. "Play with yourself, why don't you?"
It sounded like a good idea to Janet. She worked two fingers into her nest and then really began sucking. Kenny held her head between his hands and realized how little his decision not to mess with Janet had come to.
Finally he rolled her over onto her back and mounted her. He was savage and brutal, pushing in quickly, working back and forth as hard as he could. But that was just what Janet wanted, and when he felt her legs link behind his back and her heels pushing him to go harder, he cried out as he felt his orgasm rushing, pouring out, and the soft sounds of their flesh were all that he heard.
CHAPTER EIGHT
By the end of the week, it was hard to realize that Janet had ever been away. Just as in the old days, the house seemed to revolve around Janet and Janet's activities. When the phone rang, as it did constantly, it was usually for Janet. Old friends calling her up. Someone giving a party. Could she come? And in the evenings, officers from Fort Prendle ringing her up to go dancing, to go to a show, or just to meet them and drive around. Through the captain and the lieutenant, whom she had met on the train, Janet had already met a score of other men at the base. Some of them took her for a single girl. Others, having heard a sketchy account of how she was "on vacation" from her husband, felt a heightened interest for this very reason. In less than a week Janet already had more dates on hand than she could handle. She loved it all. How she loved it!
Exactly what was going on between Janet and Kenny, Anne didn't know. For outside of a few vague remarks which told exactly nothing, Janet was keeping mum on that subject.
Because Kenny's reception of Janet had been a little less enthusiastic than she had expected? Or just the opposite?
Had their old feeling for each other come back to such sharp and urgent life that even Janet, who usually babbled so freely about all of her affairs, wanted to keep this very special thing to herself?
She had freely admitted going to his office that first afternoon. "That was a great idea you had, Anne. I did need a shot for my nerves."
They had lunched together the next day. Janet, laughing: "I practically had to drag the lad by the hair of his head. I said, 'Darling, I'm the first sweetheart you ever had and I consider it your moral duty to take me to lunch when I'm just home.' Funny Kenny. He seemed to have some foolish scruples about taking a married gal to lunch. And us such old friends."
From there on Janet gave nothing away. If they were meeting each other on the side, Janet wasn't telling. She simply looked very mysterious whenever Kenny's name came up and said nothing. Her attitude seemed to be that they could make what they liked out of it.
Anne, for her part, wanted to make nothing of it. She wanted only, with all of her heart, to forget the whole thing. To forget Kenny insofar as it was possible. Because only by forgetting him could she ever hope to forget that dull, dark pain which never quite left off clawing at her heart. She had never been so thankful that she had a job to keep her busy. And with every passing day, she was more and more thankful that she had Alex to fall back on, as a friend as well as an employer.
Their day's outing together had been a complete success. Alex had proved himself an ideal companion. His conversation was intelligent and stimulating without being stuffy. He could discuss world problems from the angle of a man who had read widely and thoughtfully. He had an appreciation of poetry and all of the artistic phases of life. And he could be as gay and prankish and full of fun as a fourteen-year-old youngster.
Anne had had a far better time that day than she would have believed possible. While not forgetting that her dearest hopes and dreams had, only the day before, been blown to bits, Alex, in some very subtle way, made her feel that life had not ended altogether. Even this soon she was able to laugh, to take a real interest when Alex actually did give her her first instruction in casting a line, in waiting quietly and patiently for a fish to come swimming along and rise to the bait. "Fishing is a great lesson in patience," Alex told her.
Even this soon she was able to feel that at least one day had ended all too soon.
After that day, it was inevitable that a more personal note should be injected into their office relationship. Yet this again was such a subtle change that Anne could not have said in so many words exactly what the difference was. For her part, she seemed to be working harder than ever, partly because a sudden rush of work had come in, and even more because she welcomed work. The more she could lose herself in what she was doing, the oftener she could go home evenings, so exhausted both mentally and physically that she could scarcely see straight. This gave her less time for brooding and feeling sorry for herself.
After Janet's return, Anne fell more and more into the habit of working evenings. Her excuse to Nellie, who considered such devotion to a silly old office job complete nonsense, was that there were so many interruptions during the day. Clients, who were old friends as well, tactlessly insisted upon sitting around for a personal chat. They interfered with her schedule. She would never get caught up unless she went back to the office evenings.
Nellie would say: "Well, I think Alex Brooks ought to be ashamed of himself, piling more work on you than you're able to do. It strikes me that he's using you for a good thing, Anne." And: "Janet feels the way you're acting, Anne. It looks as if you're deliberately staying away from the house as much as possible because she's here."
Which, of course, was perfectly true.
Janet started right in having a crowd in every evening. The captain and the lieutenant brought around other officers from the base. Girls must be found for them, so Janet would phone old friends, after first inviting Anne to join the party and getting turned down. Janet put it up to her mother: "What's wrong with Anne? Honestly, she doesn't act human. You'd think she'd like to meet some good-looking men and go dancing. What's she sore about?"
Nellie would shake her head vaguely. "Anne is such a strange person. Always one for keeping to herself. She's never been one for mixing very much."
"Well," Janet would pout, "I think it's a funny way to act. I want to include her in things and she won't give me any cooperation."
Which was one of the things that annoyed Anne vaguely. Janet was willing to include her. When she had an extra, not too attractive man on hand and didn't know what to do about him, she was generously willing to turn him over to Anne.
The belle of the ball was graciously willing to throw a few spare crumbs to her less popular, less attractive sister.
Perhaps Janet didn't intend it that way.
Perhaps it was a kind of childish pique on Anne's part-a faint envy. Anne knew that this could be true. She was not proud of herself if it was true.
Still, why weary herself with dates that bored her?
Why go dancing with strange men in whom she had no interest, prod herself to a false gaiety, when in actuality she was bored stiff, force herself to stay up until all hours when what she really wanted was to be in bed getting her rest? All of it meant taking something out of her, eating up just that much more of her energy, and left her weary and scarcely fit for work when morning came.
She did try it just once. It was a deadly evening. But Janet told her: "I should think you'd be thrilled. A dance at the officers' club. And what was wrong with that Major Hilton?"
There had been nothing at all wrong with Major Hilton except that in dancing, he stumbled all over Anne's feet and he seemed allergic to all forms of conversation except wisecracks. Anne had crawled wearily into bed around four o'clock. She awoke, late, with a splitting headache-the first headache she had had in years. "I'm sorry, sis, but you'll have to include me out," she said, the next time Janet suggested a similar date.
"Simply not the party type, eh?" was Alex's grinning comment. He saw and understood more than he let on. This, no doubt, had something to do with his suggestion that Anne stay downtown and have dinner with him on the evenings when she planned to work after hours.
"You'll be doing me a favor," he assured her. "Don't you imagine a guy gets sick and tired of eating by himself, evening after evening?"
And furthermore, he added mischievously, if he fell back on one or another of the town's glamour girls for a dinner companion, it was likely to be misinterpreted as a proposal of marriage. He had simply had to school himself to eating alone. But, confidentially, he had never learned to like it.
"You aren't afraid," Anne teased him, "that after one or two dinners at a drive-in, I'll demand to know your intentions?"
"But I've already told you my intentions, honey. Trouble is, you won't take me seriously. However, if you remain steadfast in your refusal to lead me up to the altar, maybe you'll at least break down and accompany me to an occasional movie. Just to relieve the intolerable loneliness. Ah, Anne, the unspeakable loneliness of a bachelor's existence. The emptiness of it all. Anne, Anne, if you only realized."
One day, when he had been joking like this, Anne said laughingly: "Oh, Alex, shut up with such crazy talk. If you don't, I'll shut you up one of these times by taking you seriously. Then what?"
"Why not try it and find out?" Alex suggested.
Anne sighed. "I'd probably find myself out of a job. You'd get the cold jitters if you thought that I-" Alex inquired with his slow, quizzical smile: "Has it ever occurred to you, my girl, that you aren't quite as smart as you think you are?"
"I don't think I'm the least bit smart," Anne had retorted. "On the contrary. Sometimes it occurs to me that I'm the world's worst dope."
Which, as she confided to Alex, was the way she felt about the party. "Speak of it in capitals and in a hushed and reverent tone," she told Alex wryly. "And kindly spare my feelings and don't remind me that it was to have been the party to announce my engagement."
She realized belatedly that she should have called the whole thing off, once she had broken off things with Kenny. But she had already let it be known that she was giving a big party. Fortunately, she had not told anyone that she was planning to make a formal announcement of her engagement that night. Thus she was spared the humiliation of retraction. It was her mother who had suggested brightly: "I think we should go right on with plans for a party, dear. Only now we can call it a homecoming party for Janet."
Which made little difference to Anne. She cared less than nothing about what kind of a party they called it. Her only wish was that she could think up some plausible excuse not to be there. She asked Alex: "My poor little engagement party folded up and died. Now the party is all Janet's show. Alex, couldn't you invent a nice business trip for me? Don't you have a case that needs urgent, first-hand attention say, out in California? Or the Fiji Islands would do even better."
Then, completely honest: "Alex, I'm a coward! I don't want to be in on that party. There'll be a ghost there, and I always was afraid of ghosts."
Alex grinned at her. "Well, if you weren't such a little Puritan, I could take you out that night and get you drunk. Or if you would only take my adoration seriously, we could get married and show up late at the party to announce our marriage. Think how that would startle the natives. That, I think, would even get a rise out of that prima-donna sister of yours. These two courses are open to you, dear. From there on, my inventive ingenuity fails me. So I'm afraid you'll just have to face the music. And cheer up. Maybe it won't be as bad as you think."
"Will you come, Alex? I know you hate that kind of party. But please come anyway. Please come and be my escort. I need somebody just for myself," she added desperately. "Janet will have a raft of officers swarming around her. She's planning to invite practically the whole of the officers' club."
Alex said sure, he'd come, if she wanted him to. And he said again, in the usual humorous tone that went with the suggestion he had made so often that it was becoming laughable: "You could still make it an engagement party, you know. If you wanted to announce your engagement to me."
Then, more seriously, he asked her if she expected Kenny to show up at the party. Anne said that she didn't know. She supposed that Janet would see to it that Kenny came, although she hadn't as yet mentioned it. Anne was pretty sure that Janet was seeing Kenny, although her sister made a point of not mentioning him. If Kenny's name came up, Janet's mask came down. But there were plenty of ways that they could meet quietly, without anyone knowing. Anne's guess was that they were meeting occasionally, but that Kenny didn't want it known. After all, Janet was still a married woman and Kenny had his professional reputation to consider. Furthermore, Kenny was by nature a scrupulous person with great integrity and a sense of honor.
Anne doubted that he could bring himself to see very much of Janet as long as she was legally bound to another man. But an occasional meeting, enough to talk and decide how they still felt about each other, was possible. "Oh, I think so," Anne said. "I don't know for sure, but I think so. And I'm sure that Janet will see to it that Kenny comes to her party."
Because, by now, it was Janet's party in every sense. Nellie, talking over some preparation, would say: "Now about your party, Janet. Do you think we should have this or that?"
Already, Janet had postponed it a week from the date Anne had originally set. Now it was set for the next Saturday night. Janet had needed more time to select a new dress, although her bags, brought from Chicago were overflowing with beautiful clothes. But what was a party without a brand new dress?
She had decided on turquoise blue. Then, changing her mind, she decided that dead white with emerald green ornaments would be the thing. Then, discarding both ideas as not at all what she wanted, she had made a hurried trip to Washington and brought home a flame-colored taffeta which was, Anne thought, the most daring dress she had ever seen.
Without question, it was stunning on Janet with her rich, dark beauty. Also, without question, not a man would know that any other girl was present. Once Janet appeared in that dress every other woman would look hopelessly washed out.
I might just as well wear a cotton house dress for all the attention anyone will pay to me, thought Anne. And she had a great notion to do it.
She still wished that she could invent some last minute excuse to leave town when the day came. And maybe she would have, if Alex hadn't shamed her out of it. "Do you want anyone to think that you're the kind who runs away because you can't take it?"
"Who would think that?" Anne demanded. "Who would know?"
"You would," Alex reminded her, very gently.
And he was right, of course.
Janet who, all her life, had loved getting ready to give a party, could do nothing but talk party, party, party for days before the appointed night.
She took all the preparations into her own hands. With good reason, to be sure, since Anne remained completely indifferent, explaining that she had too much work at the office to allow her any spare time for party preparations. "Aren't you even going to get a new dress?" Janet asked her, looking slightly shocked when Anne retorted: "Why should I?"
"Well, what are you going to wear?"
Anne said that she hadn't any idea. Whatever was closest to hand, she supposed, when she opened her closet that night. "It's your party, dear. All of these officers who will be coming are your friends. You are the one who wants to impress them. As for our old friends," Anne laughed, "they, too, will be looking at you. They won't know what I have on.
A remark which caused Janet to offer what she considered a valuable piece of advice. To her mind, this was the thing that every girl should learn, if she wasn't born knowing it. "Anne, darling, hasn't anyone ever told you? You should make people notice what you have on. Any girl can make people sit up and take notice if she works at it." She had added, sweetly condescending: "You know, Anne, you aren't really bad-looking. You have a few really good points, your eyes for instance. You should get yourself up to accentuate them. Only you don't. You don't do a thing for yourself."
Anne thanked her, laughing, for this faint praise. And for the advice which, unfortunately, came a little late. Certainly too late to do anything about it for the party.
Anne said: "It's your show, Janet. It's all yours. I'll appear in my usual role of the mousey little sister, and I'm not feeling sorry for myself, Janet. And I'm not trying to work up any role of martyr, either. Please don't say that. It isn't true. I'm simply awfully busy these days and I've never cared as much for parties as you do, anyway."
Thoroughly annoyed-and for what reason Anne couldn't fathom-Janet said shortly: "If you tell me you'd rather go up to your room and read a good book, I'll scream. Honestly, Anne, sometimes I think all of this shy and retiring air is an act with you. You've been overdoing it just a little, if you ask me. Don't you like it that I've come home? Do you resent my being here?"
Anne was quickly conciliatory. Nothing was further from her mind than to hurt Janet's feelings, and she said so. "I don't resent your being here and I am not putting on any act. I haven't been any too gay since you came. That I'll admit. I don't think we need go into the reasons."
"I suppose you mean because of Kenny," Janet said sharply. "Well, you needn't blame me for that. Did I ask you to break off your engagement? Did I?"
"Oh, please," Anne said quickly. "Let's not talk about that. Let's just leave Kenny out of this, if you don't mind. I can't see what he has to do with whether or not I'm getting a new dress for your party. Please, Janet, let's skip it. Okay?"
And that was that, for the moment.
Janet went on with her excited preparations. She had insisted on arranging for a small orchestra for the dance music, which even Nellie conceded seemed a needless expense. "After all, dear, we're very small town and this is supposed to be an informal welcome home party." But Janet overrode that objection, just as she overrode doubts about bringing in a caterer to provide the refreshments . "Look, Mother, when I give a party, I like to do it right. I'll pay for all of this myself if you can't afford it. Just because the Hillview natives aren't used to sophisticated parties is no reason why I shouldn't give one. Frankly, I want to knock their eyes out. And furthermore," Janet added, "some of those boys at the base are anything but hicks. Some of those lads come from wealthy homes and they know how things should be done."
"Janet, believe me, darling, I don't want to seem critical. But why should you care what those boys think? I dare say many of them are very nice young men, and used to seeing things done right. However, you seem to forget about Bob, dear. And it worries me. If you and Bob-" But Janet, stamping her angry little red-shod foot, had wanted to hear nothing about Bob. "I've told you, Mother. I'm on vacation from Bob. I want to have a good time and I want this party to be right. I mean to have it right. And I can't see that it makes the slightest difference about my loyalty to Bob, or my wifely duty to Bob, whether I give this party with or without the trimmings."
So Janet meant to give it with all the trimmings.
It was three or four days before the all-important Saturday night that the name of a certain Andy Ritter, a colonel by rank, began to enter into Janet's conversations.
Janet mentioned him, the first time, at breakfast. She had met the colonel the night before at another informal dance at the officers' club. "The lad is tall, blond, and handsome," Janet enthused. And, she added, a Texan. On first meeting, he appeared to be the grim and silent type. But just give her time, Janet assured them, and she was sure she could soften him up. "There's a rumor," she added, "that the lad has more money than he knows what to do with. Oil wells." She had invited him to her party, threatening to skip out to the camp and drag him in by his scalp if he didn't come on his own steam.
Anne said, unable to resist the mild dig: "Well, well. A millionaire and a colonel. This bodes no good for Bob. Perhaps I'd better write my brother-in-law and warn him to expect the worst." Having said the words with a teasing grin, she was astonished at Janet's angry flare-up.
"Look, Anne, if I catch you meddling in my affairs or writing things to Bob that are none of your business, I'll make you wish you hadn't."
It was not the first time that Janet's attitude about Bob had puzzled Anne, nor the first time that she had wondered if Janet had told the whole truth about that situation. Could it possibly be that Janet's "vacation" from marriage was an enforced vacation? That their temporary separation was Bob's idea, not Janet's?
Her sister, Anne knew very well, had always been quick to invent little "fairy stories" to present her own doings in the best possible light. Had there been trouble with Bob, with Bob laying down the law? Janet, if she ran true to form, would be the last one to tell anything that put her in a bad light. Or even in a dim one.
Oh, well, it was none of her business, Anne reminded herself. If Janet was staging a little play-casting herself as the star, or the wronged wife, or what have you-let her stage and direct it according to her own ideas. It made little difference to Anne. And to Kenny?
Ultimately, Anne was forced to come back to Kenny in her thoughts.
With absolutely nothing to go on, she simply couldn't turn off the fantasies which would come to torment her every so often. They were most frequent just before she fell off to sleep at night.
She had deliberately avoided Kenny ever since the day when she had returned his ring. He had not been near the house, nor had he phoned Anne, either at home or at the office. Perhaps could she have seen him, just once, she would have known just what his feelings were in relation to herself and to Janet.
Not knowing, she had only her imagination to go on and her imagination ran riot. She would lie with closed eyes, imagining the scene between them, that first day when Janet went to his office. She pictured Kenny taking Janet into his arms. Looking deep into her beautiful eyes, slowly putting his lips to her soft, bright ones. Whispering thickly: "Darling, oh my darling, it's been so long. I've tried to forget you but I never could. You are my real love. You always will be. I just can't help myself."
And after that?
Were they meeting clandestinely? It would be a simple enough matter, Anne knew. Janet had the use of the family car, and frequently she took it out in the evenings with only the vaguest explanations as to where she was going. Nor did she discuss afterwards where she had been.
Hillview was within easy driving distance of three or four other small towns where there were quiet, secluded little restaurants where no one would ever see them. Oh, it would be simple enough to arrange, and no one would ever know.
Kenny. It would be exactly like him to say: "I must see you, talk with you occasionally, but not too often. Because to have you near me, where I can look at you, talk with you, touch you simply by reaching out my hand-I can't stand too much of that, darling. It's sweet torment, but torment just the same. So until you've made up your mind what you're going to do about Bob-until you are really and in fact free-we must content ourselves with these very occasional meetings."
Oh, that would be Kenny, all right. That would be the way he would handle things. His sense of right and wrong was too strong ever to permit him to indulge in any easy, obvious affair with a girl who, legally, still belonged to another man. And if this were not the truth, why wouldn't Kenny have phoned her long before now?
If, when he saw Janet again, he had discovered that his old feeling for her was completely dead, Kenny would have been on the phone in no time flat. "Darling, this is a completely free man who is calling you, and when do I see you?" Of course that was what he would have done.
But she hadn't heard a word. Not one single word from him. And since Janet seemed resolved to give away nothing where Kenny was concerned, Anne had given up trying to feel her out.
Then, the very last night before the party, Janet pulled another surprise. She had gone out to a movie, alone so she said. She had come in before eleven o'clock. Anne was in bed, just ready to turn off the lamp on her bedside table, when Janet opened her door, not bothering to knock. She closed the door carefully behind her. Then, coming over to the bed, she looked at Anne. Anne saw that she was furious. Her mouth was working and her hands were clenched.
What's up now? Anne wondered.
She couldn't have been more surprised than when she heard Janet saying: "You needn't think that I don't know you've told Kenny not to come to my party tomorrow night. And I think it's a mean, contemptible trick. You don't want him yourself, because you've fallen in love with Alex Brooks. That's plain enough. But I guess you aren't sure of landing Alex, so you've thought up this neat little scheme to keep Kenny dangling. Break your engagement on the pretext that I'm coming home, but when I get here, put on this act of injured innocence. So Kenny is afraid to move or turn for fear it isn't being fair to you. As clever a little act as I've ever seen-playing both ends against the middle. But I think you're mean, mean, mean, to keep Kenny from coming to my party."
With that, Janet dissolved into tears.
For a moment, all Anne could do was stare at her. Finally she managed the only words she could think of. "Are you absolutely crazy?"
CHAPTER NINE
Anne was so weary that her bones ached, and nervously tense from her physical exhaustion. She had had a busy day, and another one ahead of her-with the dreaded party at the end of it. All she wanted was to be allowed to turn out the lights and go to sleep. She was definitely in no mood to put up with one of Janet's tantrums. Janet's little outburst had been so absurd, the things she said so completely divorced from all reality, that it would have been laughable had Anne been less physically depleted.
But, tired as she was, she simply wasn't up to humoring her sister who had never struck her as more of a spoiled baby. Anne heard herself saying, more sharply than she had intended: "Look, Janet, I need my sleep. If Kenny won't come to your party, that's too bad. But to say that it's my fault is simply silly. I haven't seen Kenny or talked to him since you came home. And as for saying that I'm in love with Alex, if you don't mind my asking, how did you ever dream up that crazy idea?" She laughed. "Alex isn't the marrying kind and everyone in town knows it. I work in his office, and we're friends. But I assure you it's strictly a platonic friendship."
Janet laughed shortly. "Platonic friendship! The old, old alibi. Maybe it will be news to you, darling, to hear that there ain't no such thing-not with any attractive, unmarried man. And here's another piece of news. It's town talk that you're in love with the lad and that Alex is slipping fast. But have it your own way, if you insist. Only don't expect me to believe you. However, I didn't come in here to discuss Alex Brooks. It's Kenny and my party."
Anne, sitting up, had shoved an extra pillow behind her back. She inquired, honestly curious: "Whatever gave you the idea that I was keeping Kenny away from your party?"
Janet, looking sulky, had curled up at the foot of the bed, one foot tucked under her. Apparently she was going to stay, whether Anne liked it or not, until she got good and ready to go back to her own room. "He practically told me so," she said.
"I don't believe it," Anne stated flatly, after a moment's silence. "Kenny doesn't lie."
"Well, maybe he didn't say that in so many words. Yet he did say definitely that he wouldn't come, and any nitwit could figure out that you're the reason."
Anne shrugged. "No doubt he thinks that it wouldn't be in very good taste. After all-"
"Well, good taste or not, I want Kenny at my party."
"Why?"
The direct impact of that one brief word seemed to startle Janet momentarily. "Why shouldn't I want him to come?" she countered sullenly. "After all, Kenny Wilcox and I grew up together. When we were kids, we always went to each other's parties. Then we fell in love."
"Then you married another man," Anne reminded her sharply. "For heaven's sake, Janet, aren't you ever going to grow up? Are you never going to find out that you can't eat your cake and have it too? I don't know whether you're still in love with Kenny or not. If you are, you should divorce Bob. If you're not, if Bob is the one you honestly want-" She sighed, shaking her head. "It's hard to make you out, Janet. I don't mean to criticize. It's your own business how you want to manage your life. But the way it looks to me, you won't play honest with anyone. You're still married to Bob, but before you were home twenty-four hours, you were rushing around on other dates, arranging for parties, making a play for Kenny, doing exactly as you did before you ever had a husband. And all that talk about Bob sending you off on a vacation from marriage, you can't expect anyone to take that without a grain of salt, Janet. A man doesn't order the wife he loves to run off and have herself a gay time with other men. He just doesn't."
"Bob did," Janet said. Then, to Anne's astonishment, Janet had thrown herself across the bed and was sobbing wildly.
To Anne's further astonishment, Janet was sobbing out a story that was not, after all, too surprising. The surprising thing was that Janet was, for once, admitting the real truth.
Bob too, it seemed, had accused Janet of being a spoiled baby. Of refusing to grow up and accept the responsibilities of married life. "He's like everyone else," Janet cried brokenly. "When we were first married, he spoiled me and pampered me. He used to call me his spoiled beautiful doll and said he loved me for being just the way I was. Then the change came almost overnight. He seemed to hate me for being that way. It's always been like that. People spoil me; then they blame me for being spoiled."
Something to that, Anne admitted to herself wryly. For every spoiled brat, there had to be someone to do the spoiling.
"Even you, Anne," Janet was saying. "You've always taken a back seat when I was around, and you did it again when you knew I was coming home. Nobody asked you to break your engagement to Kenny because of me. You just turned him loose as if it were the natural thing to do. Why didn't you fight for him, if you thought a fight was indicated? But no. You just open your hands and let him go. Then you blame me for it."
"I'm not blaming you," Anne said gently.
"Oh, yes you do. Maybe you don't know it yourself, but in your heart you blame me, all right. And you've resented my being here. You keep out of my way. You're either so darned polite to me that it's painful or else you don't pay any attention to me at all." Janet looked up suddenly. "You always did hate me, didn't you, Anne?"
Genuinely shocked, Anne denied it instantly. "How can you say such a thing, Janet?"
"Because it's true, that's why. We've always been one of those cases like you read about. The little sister, always envious of the older sister who overshadows her. She doesn't know it's hate, but it is. There was a case not long ago in the papers. A twelve-year-old girl took a gun and shot her sixteen-year-old sister, and afterwards, all she would say was that she'd always hated her sister and was glad she had killed her. Did you ever want to kill me, Anne?"
It was shocking to hear Janet put that direct question in a flat, matter-of-fact voice. It was completely untrue, of course. Possibly there were such neurotic cases, but they had nothing to do with Anne's feeling about her sister. A touch of envy-Anne had always been willing to admit that much to herself. But it had never been too important, not enough to make her bitter or vindictive. And she had always been ready to offer Janet a sincere and generous love. Only Janet had never seemed to want it. Or to have the time to bother.
Anne reached for the pack of cigarettes on her bedside table. She rarely smoked, but she kept them there, just in case. She took one out, lit it, and handed it to Janet. "You're letting your nerves get the best of you, honey. You're imagining stuff. If you really wanted me to play the devoted sister, nothing would please me more than to do it."
Still in that gentle, loving voice she continued: "That crazy stuff you just talked. It isn't worth replying to. Perhaps there've been times when I've wished I were a little more like you, because you're beautiful and you attract attention and love much more easily that I do. But that doesn't mean that I hate you, or resent you or ever have. And you said that Bob changed and started to hate you. I don't believe that, either."
"He hated some of the things about me. He said so." Janet's sobbing had quieted, but there were still tears in her eyes.
"We started to have little quarrels. Don't ask me about what. Unimportant things. I'd have a crowd in during the afternoon and forget all about dinner. Bob would come home, hungry and tired, and get sore because nothing was ready to eat. He didn't like some of my friends. He didn't like being dragged out to dance, when he had planned to read or study. I said he couldn't expect me to poke around the house all day and not expect him to take me out and amuse me in the evening."
Janet's short laugh was completely without humor. "It used to sound exactly like those funny strips. Well, one evening the going was more rugged than usual. I forget what I was so furious about. Anyway, I said I only wished I had never broken my engagement to Kenny Wilcox.
"Well," Janet took a long, deep drag on the cigarette, "that did it. At first, Bob was all for calling everything quits. I apologized, tried to calm him down. He didn't calm. He told me straight to my face that I wasn't grown-up enough to be married to anybody. He said that he doubted if I was in love with anybody-except myself. He said that I was just a spoiled, selfish, inconsiderate child. Finally he agreed not to insist on a divorce right away, but he refused to go on as we'd been doing. He said it was interfering with his work, slowly destroying him. He was determined to give up our apartment, put the furniture in storage. He was going to move to a hotel and I was to come home, forget that I had a husband, finish up my adolescence as he called it."
Janet's small smile was grim. "You'd have thought he was telling a kid to go back and finish up school. That's exactly the way he treated me the last month or so-like a kid. And a not very bright one. Kenny Wilcox," Janet explained, "was to be part of the program. Bob wanted me to see him, date him, find out exactly and for sure just how I felt about him. Bob said that he wanted no part of a wife who still imagined she was half in love with an old sweetheart."
Anne asked: "Didn't he know that Kenny and I were engaged?"
Janet shook her head. "No. I didn't tell him. These quarrels started long before you wrote me about you and Kenny. When you did write-well, I just kept it to myself."
"I see." Anne was thoughtful. "Well," she said finally, "I'm sorry it was like that, Janet. But maybe it will all straighten itself out. Possibly Bob did a very sensible thing. After you're separated for a time, you'll both know better how you feel about each other." She laughed. "I still don't see what all that has to do with your barging in here, accusing me of keeping Kenny away from your party."
Janet said, smiling a trifle, completely honest for once: "Just the brat in me, I guess. Flying off the handle as usual, when I can't get my own way. Sometimes I hate myself for being the way I am. When I stop and take a good look at myself, I do."
She added: "I guess that was the reason Bob got under my skin. Two or three times, he made me look at myself, and I didn't exactly like what I saw." Then, brightening, with the gay laugh that was more natural to her: "But let's face it. I am a spoiled brat. And the brat wants Kenny Wilcox to come to her party."
Already, Anne was beginning to wonder how much of Janet's emotional outburst was the genuine article, Janet had always been one for occasional attacks of heavy dramatics. Either way, Anne was sleepy. She needed her rest. She had to be up at six-thirty, and it was already after one. Ready to make any concession that would quiet Janet, send her back to her own bed, Anne said: "Well, I'll tell you what, sis. I'll make it a point to see Kenny tomorrow. It may not do a bit of good. But I'll make it clear to him that I don't want him to skip the party on my account. Okay?"
CHAPTER TEN
Alone, finally, with the room darkened, Anne found it impossible to sleep immediately after all. Her nerves refusing to relax? The tension refusing to release her? Or was it that for the very first time Alex Brooks presented a problem that called for a little serious thinking?
It was the first time that she had ever considered even the remote possibility that there might be a serious undertone to Alex's kidding remarks about marriage.
She did not really believe it now. Alex Brooks in love with her? Oh, impossible. Utterly impossible. And yet, as her mind ran back, she honestly wondered.
She thought of the times, not more than once or twice, when she had glanced up suddenly to catch his eyes fixed on her, and a certain look in them which at the time had surprised her vaguely. Warmth? Tenderness? Something even deeper, more urgent than tenderness?
Imagination, she told herself now. Sheer imagination. By mentioning Alex, Janet had put the notion in her head. He thought of her as a friend, and nothing more.
There was nothing to be done about it except get a good night's sleep, Anne thought. Her mind was getting a work-out what with Alex's new-found interest in her. She would have to watch herself with Alex, Anne thought with a smile.
The next morning she asked Alex what had become of Barney Fosdick. Alex laughed. "Here's a letter that arrived today," he said. "Barney's driving down today. I'll find him a hotel room and we'll both be at the party tonight."
"Both of you? But won't Barney Fosdick be tired? Besides, we're hardly in his age group."
Alex stared at her. "Sometimes you say really stupid things," he said. "What makes you think he wouldn't enjoy the company of young people?"
Anne shrugged. "It's all right with me, Alex. I was just thinking out loud."
Then Anne remembered her conversation with Janet. "I'll get to work," she said, and marched to her desk. She tried Kenny's office, but there was no answer.
At lunch, she walked over. There was no one in the receptionist's area, so Anne walked right in to Kenny's private office.
Janet and Kenny were locked in an embrace. Kenny jumped back when he saw Anne. "I'll just be a minute," Anne said.
"Let me explain," Kenny said, blushing.
Anne told him to be quiet. "I just want to tell you to please come to the party. That's all. You're more than welcome, and both Janet and I want you there. OK?" And she turned and sailed away.
That night, the party had just started when Janet rushed up to Anne and said, "Alex is here-and he's brought along some old bum!"
The bum was Barney Fosdick, one of the country's greatest artists. When he saw Anne his face exploded in happiness. "It's you," he said. "The girl in the yellow scarf!" That was just the beginning. He went on to relate how beautiful Anne was, and that she was the spitting image of his first love, an actress named Lili.
The rest of the party was little more than a tribute to Anne, who had never been more vividly beautiful in her life. She came alive that night, and many people noticed. But the next morning was something else. Janet was in a sour mood, having been outshone by her little sister. A vicious argument developed, and within an hour Anne had moved out. She decided to stay with her Aunt Molly for awhile. But Barney Fosdick had other ideas. He wanted her to come to New York with him, and Anne was considering it. Then Barney had a heart attack, and it was all that Kenny could do to pull him through it. That settled the matter in Anne's mind. The old artist needed her, and she wanted to take care of him.
Kenny made one attempt to talk Anne out of it, and it ended in a violent argument, with Kenny storming out of Alex's office.
In New York, Anne was exposed to a world that she barely knew existed. But Barney's health was failing quickly. She would read to him, but it was very difficult for Barney to stay awake for any period of time.
But whenever he was awake, his eyes would dwell on Anne and his smile was all the payment she would ever need.
And then, one night, he died in his sleep.
Everything Barney had, he left to Anne. She became an overnight celebrity-"The Girl in the Yellow Scarf." But Barney's estate contained very little.
There were debts, of course. But Barney had been the kind of artist who was destined to die broke. While Anne was pondering all of this, one of the largest advertising agencies in New York offered her a contract to model a new line of cosmetics.
Anne was thrilled-and not a little happy that such an offer came to her, and not to Janet, who would have sold her soul for the opportunity to be a New York model.
It was all moving very fast, and a month later Anne decided to return home and settle her life once and for all. Her mother was glad to see her, and Janet-well, that was a real surprise.
Bob had been in an accident-not too serious-but it had straightened Janet out. "You know, you were right all along," Janet said to Anne. "I'm nothing but a spoiled brat, and it took this accident to make me see it."
When the conversation got around to Kenny, Janet said: "Now that's where you're a brat. He can't stand me-and I admit that when I returned, getting Kenny away from you was one of my goals. But he wouldn't have it, and when you dumped him, he almost died."
Anne couldn't believe it. But Janet was telling the truth for perhaps the first time in her life.
Anne arrived at Kenny's office about an hour later. He was cool and proper. They talked for a while, and then Anne, not able to talk about what was really on her mind, arose to leave.
"I guess you'll take that job in New York," Kenny said.
"Well, why not?" Anne snapped back. "There's nothing holding me here any more!"
"Just a minute," Kenny said as she started towards the door. "I know you won't stay, but I've got to tell you something, even though you won't believe it. I love you. I don't love Janet. It was all her doing, even the scene here in my office."
She was in his arms instantly. His mouth was warm and alive and she hugged him close. "What about that modeling job?" Kenny asked.
"A modeling job leads to a man," Anne replied. "And I've already got my man!"
